Back to jobs
New

Staff Platform Software Engineer, AI Enablement

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 You and The Role 

Zipline operates autonomous delivery services that bring essential goods to customers and communities in the real world. As AI enables more teams to turn ideas into working software, we are hiring a Staff Platform Software Engineer to ensure that this new velocity strengthens—not jeopardizes—the systems that support our operations, deliveries, and customers.

You will build the scalable, secure interfaces that let AI-enabled applications and internal tools safely connect to Zipline’s production systems, including operationally critical services. Working closely with Forward Deployed AI Engineers, application teams, and infrastructure partners, you will define the platforms, standards, and guardrails that let teams ship quickly while protecting service reliability and the systems behind Zipline’s autonomy mission.

This is a hands-on role for an experienced application engineer who enjoys turning ambiguous, cross-functional problems into well-designed systems that other teams can confidently build upon.

What You'll Do

  • Define and build the “paved road” for connecting AI-enabled applications and internal tools to production systems, including services that support delivery operations and customer experience.
  • Design and implement reusable APIs, gateways, middleware, and integration patterns that are scalable, secure, observable, and straightforward for engineers to adopt.
  • Partner early with Forward Deployed AI Engineers on high-impact projects, helping them select production-ready integration patterns and move successful prototypes into supported services.
  • Own the technical decision for integrations that access protected production boundaries: approve the proposed design, require a safer redesign, or decline an integration that cannot meet Zipline’s standards for operational safety and reliability.
  • Define and operate the platform safeguards that protect production systems—including authentication, authorization, workload isolation, rate limiting, auditability, capacity management, observability, alerting, graceful degradation, and safe failure modes.
  • Establish clear technical standards and governance for how AI-enabled tools access production and operationally critical systems.
  • Create reference implementations, documentation, and developer experiences that make the secure, supported path the easiest path to adopt.
  • Partner with service-owning teams to ensure platform components and integrations have explicit ownership, operational expectations, and sustainable support models.

What Success Looks Like

  • Teams building AI-enabled tools use well-defined, self-service integration patterns instead of creating one-off production connections.
  • New applications can reach the production systems they need without weakening reliability, security, or the operational systems supporting Zipline’s delivery service.
  • The platform is broadly adopted by Forward Deployed AI Engineers and application teams because it is practical, well-documented, and materially speeds up safe delivery.
  • Production integrations have explicit service ownership, observability, capacity expectations, and safe operating boundaries.
  • Integration risks are identified and resolved before they affect customers, delivery operations, or critical services.

What You'll Bring

  • 8+ years of software engineering experience, including experience building and operating production applications at meaningful scale.
  • Deep experience designing developer-facing APIs and distributed systems.
  • Strong application engineering judgment, with a track record of translating product, customer, or operational needs into maintainable production software.
  • Experience building cloud services and event-driven systems, including technologies such as Go, Protobuf, Kafka, and API-based service architectures.
  • Experience designing for reliability, scale, and safe handling of high-volume or unpredictable traffic.
  • Strong understanding of authentication, authorization, rate limiting, observability, and operational safety in production applications.
  • A collaborative, pragmatic approach to technical leadership: you set a high bar for production readiness while helping teams make progress.
  • Comfort using AI-assisted development tools as part of your engineering practice, along with the judgment to validate, harden, and operate the resulting systems.

Nice to Have

  • Experience designing abuse-resistant or public-facing APIs.
  • Experience with platform engineering, API gateways, service meshes, or developer platforms.
  • Background in security engineering, application security, site reliability engineering, or incident response.
  • Experience establishing technical standards or governance in a fast-moving engineering organization.
  • Experience working with internal tools, data systems, or AI-enabled applications.
  • Experience building systems that support real-world operations, logistics, autonomous systems, or other high-reliability services.

What Else You Need To Know

Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws or our own sensibilities.

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!

Apply for this job

*

indicates a required field

Resume/CV*

Accepted file types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf

Cover Letter

Accepted file types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf

Select...
Select...
Select...

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.

As set forth in Zipline ’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

Select...
Select...
Race & Ethnicity Definitions

If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection. As a government contractor subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measure the effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categories is as follows:

A "disabled veteran" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disability.

A "recently separated veteran" means any veteran during the three-year period beginning on the date of such veteran's discharge or release from active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval, or air service.

An "active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran" means a veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service during a war, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge has been authorized under the laws administered by the Department of Defense.

An "Armed forces service medal veteran" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.

Select...

Voluntary Self-Identification of Disability

Form CC-305
Page 1 of 1
OMB Control Number 1250-0005
Expires 04/30/2026

Why are you being asked to complete this form?

We are a federal contractor or subcontractor. The law requires us to provide equal employment opportunity to qualified people with disabilities. We have a goal of having at least 7% of our workers as people with disabilities. The law says we must measure our progress towards this goal. To do this, we must ask applicants and employees if they have a disability or have ever had one. People can become disabled, so we need to ask this question at least every five years.

Completing this form is voluntary, and we hope that you will choose to do so. Your answer is confidential. No one who makes hiring decisions will see it. Your decision to complete the form and your answer will not harm you in any way. If you want to learn more about the law or this form, visit the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) website at www.dol.gov/ofccp.

How do you know if you have a disability?

A disability is a condition that substantially limits one or more of your “major life activities.” If you have or have ever had such a condition, you are a person with a disability. Disabilities include, but are not limited to:

  • Alcohol or other substance use disorder (not currently using drugs illegally)
  • Autoimmune disorder, for example, lupus, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, HIV/AIDS
  • Blind or low vision
  • Cancer (past or present)
  • Cardiovascular or heart disease
  • Celiac disease
  • Cerebral palsy
  • Deaf or serious difficulty hearing
  • Diabetes
  • Disfigurement, for example, disfigurement caused by burns, wounds, accidents, or congenital disorders
  • Epilepsy or other seizure disorder
  • Gastrointestinal disorders, for example, Crohn's Disease, irritable bowel syndrome
  • Intellectual or developmental disability
  • Mental health conditions, for example, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorder, schizophrenia, PTSD
  • Missing limbs or partially missing limbs
  • Mobility impairment, benefiting from the use of a wheelchair, scooter, walker, leg brace(s) and/or other supports
  • Nervous system condition, for example, migraine headaches, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis (MS)
  • Neurodivergence, for example, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder, dyslexia, dyspraxia, other learning disabilities
  • Partial or complete paralysis (any cause)
  • Pulmonary or respiratory conditions, for example, tuberculosis, asthma, emphysema
  • Short stature (dwarfism)
  • Traumatic brain injury
Select...

PUBLIC BURDEN STATEMENT: According to the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 no persons are required to respond to a collection of information unless such collection displays a valid OMB control number. This survey should take about 5 minutes to complete.