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Staff Motion Planning Software Engineer - Zip

South San Francisco, California, USA

About Zipline

Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service. We are on a mission to serve all humans equally by ensuring access to food, medicine and essential goods anytime, anywhere. We design, build, and operate the world’s largest autonomous logistics system, delivering critical supplies quickly and reliably. Today, Zipline operates on four continents, makes a delivery somewhere in the world every 30 seconds, and has completed millions of deliveries to date, including blood, vaccines, medical supplies, food, and retail products. 

Our customers include the world’s largest and most prominent healthcare systems, governments, retailers, restaurants and global businesses who rely on us to save lives, reduce emissions, increase economic opportunity, and provide delivery from point A to point B as fast as possible. The drone is only 15% of what we’ve built to enable seamless, reliable, global operations.

Our system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and gives people time back. With more than 140 million commercial autonomous miles safely flown, Zipline is redefining access to healthcare, consumer products, and food across the globe.

We operate at a global scale and are looking for practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth. Our team is motivated by building systems that have a direct, meaningful impact on people’s lives and by scaling the future of logistics. We are seeking people who sculpt from first principles, enjoy facing adversity, and can do the impossible at record breaking speeds.

About the Role

Zipline operates the world’s largest autonomous logistics system (ground or air) — and in the coming year, we will be hyper-scaling from thousands to tens of thousands of carefully coordinated drone deliveries in several dense, dynamic U.S. metros. Our Autonomy Motion Planning team is looking for a Senior/Staff Software Engineer who is passionate about developing autonomous systems for the real world. This role will explore cutting-edge approaches to decision making and trajectory planning that will enable more accurate and timely deliveries, putting you in the position to make critical product decisions that will shape our future architectures.

What You'll Do

  • Build real-time trajectory generation and decision-making for autonomous flight (search-based, sampling, MPC, convex/non-convex optimization).

  • Design collision avoidance and large-scale multi-agent planning (fleet deconfliction, airspace rules, traffic management) that scales to 10,000+ flights/day.

  • Tackle joint optimization across safety, energy, time, and reliability—balancing mission goals with vehicle/airspace constraints.

  • Plan in uncertain environments with complex dynamics: chance-constraints, robustness to wind/turbulence, degraded sensors, and partial observability.

  • Extend the autonomy stack for new aircraft and payloads; define clean interfaces with perception and controls.

  • Prove it before flight: scenario libraries, SIL/HIL, large-scale sim, log replay, and fault-injection.

  • Mine real fleet data to validate safety metrics (separation, risk, intervention rate), improve models, and burn down long-tail failure modes.

  • Continuously reduce cost/latency (vectorization, warm starts, smart heuristics) while raising reliability.

What You'll Bring

  • Master's degree in Computer Science or related field and 3+ years of experience building software for safety-critical systems (aerospace/AV/robotics/medical).

  • Strong in Rust/C++/C for real-time, fault-tolerant code on embedded/Linux.

  • Depth in planning & search (A*/ anytime / RRT*/sampling), trajectory optimization/MPC, or multi-agent deconfliction—shipped on real robots/vehicles.

  • Hands-on with simulation at scale, SIL/HIL, log replay, and metrics-driven validation.

  • Evidence of shipping production-grade autonomy through ambiguous, noisy conditions—owning the last mile to reliability.

  • Systems thinker who collaborates tightly with perception, controls, and flight ops; crisp docs and design reviews.

Why Join Now?

  • Impact at scale: Your planner won’t benchmark in isolation—it will fly thousands of missions/day delivering essential goods.

  • Technical frontier: Real-time multi-agent autonomy, joint optimization, and robustness under uncertainty at a scale few have seen.

  • Ownership: High-leverage IC role—your decisions shape Zipline’s flight stack and the behavior of a global fleet.

  • Category leadership: Help define the standard for safe, reliable autonomous flight in the real world.

 

What Else You Need to Know   

The starting cash range for this role is $225,000 - $280,000; please note that this is a target, starting cash range for a candidate who meets the minimum qualifications for this role. We are always open to negotiation. The final cash pay for this role will depend on a variety of factors, including a specific candidate's experience, qualifications, skills, working location, and projected impact. The total compensation package for this role may also include: equity compensation; discretionary annual or performance bonuses; sales incentives; benefits such as medical, dental and vision insurance; paid time off; and more. 
 
Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, mental or physical disability, medical condition, genetic information, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, military or veteran status, citizenship, or other characteristics protected by state, federal or local law or our other policies.
 
We value diversity at Zipline and welcome applications from those who are traditionally underrepresented in tech. If you like the sound of this position but are not sure if you are the perfect fit, please apply!

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