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Embedded Software Engineer, Validation

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 

We are looking for an Embedded Software Engineer to build the automated validation systems that ensure the reliability of the embedded platform powering autonomous aircraft operating in safety-critical environments.

This role sits within the Embedded Platform team, which develops the foundational middleware and infrastructure used throughout the flight software stack. Our systems provide critical capabilities including interprocess communication (IPC), logging and observability, communication bridges, over-the-air (OTA) software updates, and live telemetry between aircraft and cloud services.

As an Embedded Software Validation Engineer, you will design and build the simulation and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) infrastructure used to validate these platform services. Working closely with software engineers across the Flight Software organization, you will develop comprehensive automated test scenarios that verify functionality, performance, reliability, and fault tolerance before software reaches an aircraft.

This is a software engineering role focused on building scalable validation infrastructure, not manual testing.

What You'll Do

  • Design, implement, and maintain automated validation infrastructure for embedded platform software
  • Build simulation and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test environments that exercise platform services under realistic operating conditions
  • Develop automated test scenarios covering core platform capabilities including:
    • interprocess communication (IPC)
    • logging and observability
    • communication bridges
    • over-the-air (OTA) update systems
    • live telemetry and cloud connectivity
  • Design tests that validate functionality, reliability, performance, and behavior under fault conditions
  • Develop stress, endurance, regression, and fault-injection test suites for distributed embedded systems
  • Partner closely with Embedded Platform engineers throughout the software development lifecycle to improve testability and define validation strategies during feature design
  • Build tooling for automated test orchestration, execution, reporting, and dashboards
  • Contribute to continuous integration pipelines and automated validation workflows
  • Investigate failures across simulation, HIL, and production environments to identify root causes
  • Occasionally contribute improvements to production embedded software that increase reliability, observability, or testability
  • Build automated validation infrastructure that enables engineers to rapidly verify platform changes with confidence
  • Increase coverage of simulation and HIL testing across the Embedded Platform stack
  • Identify reliability and performance issues before they reach flight hardware
  • Improve the observability and testability of core middleware through close collaboration with platform engineers
  • Enable the Flight Software organization to move faster while maintaining the reliability expected of safety-critical systems

What You'll Bring

Required

  • Experience developing embedded or systems software
  • Professional experience with Rust, Python, or similar programming languages
  • Experience working with embedded Linux systems
  • Strong understanding of systems-level concepts including:
    • concurrency
    • networking
    • interprocess communication
    • distributed or multi-process systems
  • Experience designing automated test frameworks or validation infrastructure
  • Strong debugging and problem-solving skills across software and hardware boundaries
  • Ability to collaborate closely with software engineers to improve system quality and testability

Preferred

  • Experience building Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) or simulation-based validation systems
  • Experience in safety-critical or high-reliability industries such as aerospace, automotive, robotics, industrial systems, or medical devices
  • Experience with autonomous systems or robotics
  • Experience validating distributed embedded systems
  • Familiarity with OTA update systems, observability platforms, or telemetry infrastructure
  • Experience with performance testing, stress testing, fault injection, or resilience testing
  • Experience building automated test orchestration, dashboards, and reporting systems
  • Familiarity with CI/CD systems for embedded software development

You enjoy understanding how complex systems behave and are motivated by building the infrastructure that makes them more reliable. You see testing as an engineering discipline, not a separate phase of development, and enjoy writing software that uncovers subtle system interactions before they become production problems. You are comfortable working across embedded software, simulation, hardware, and automation, and you enjoy collaborating with engineers to design systems that are both robust and testable.

What Else You Need To Know

The starting cash ranges for this role is $160,000 - $250,000. Please note that this is a target, starting cash range for a candidate who meets the minimum qualifications for this role. 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. This position may be hired at one of three levels based on the candidate’s experience, skills, and demonstrated scope:

  • Software Engineer II: $160,000 - $190,000
  • Senior Software Engineer: $190,000 - $220,000
  • Staff Software Engineer: $220,000 - $250,000

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!

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.

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