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Lead Software Engineer, Developer Productivity

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 

You are the Software Engineering Manager for Zipline’s Developer Productivity team. Your team builds the tools and infrastructure that help engineers develop, test, and ship software across FlightSystems and cloud.

You will own the team’s roadmap, technical direction, and execution. Your work will improve the speed and reliability of CI, expand our use of remote build execution, simplify developer workflows, and support the long-term evolution of Zipline’s software platform.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You will grow and coach the team, stay close to technical decisions, and work directly with software, firmware, autonomy, and infrastructure teams to solve the problems slowing engineers down.

What You'll Do

  • Lead the team responsible for Zipline’s build systems, CI/CD infrastructure, remote execution, and developer tooling
  • Own the roadmap for improving CI speed, reliability, and developer experience across FlightSystems and cloud
  • Expand our on-prem remote build execution platform and move more build and test workloads onto it
  • Improve our Bazel build graph, remove bottlenecks, and make builds more hermetic and compatible with remote execution
  • Simplify CI by moving build logic into Bazel and consolidating heavy workloads into common Buildkite pipelines
  • Lead large migrations, including bringing firmware and other development workflows into the shared build and CI platform
  • Define reliability goals, observability, capacity plans, and incident-response practices for critical developer infrastructure
  • Hire, coach, and develop engineers while building a team culture centered on ownership, practical problem-solving, and strong internal customer support
  • Partner with engineering leaders to set priorities and make clear tradeoffs between developer velocity, reliability, safety, and cost

What You'll Bring

  • A strong software engineering background and experience managing engineers working on developer platforms, infrastructure, build systems, or CI/CD
  • Deep knowledge of modern build and CI systems, including remote execution, caching, artifact management, and distributed infrastructure
  • Experience setting technical direction and delivering complex, cross-team projects with measurable results
  • Strong technical judgment and the ability to stay close to architecture, implementation, and operational issues
  • A developer-focused mindset and a track record of building tools that engineers rely on every day
  • Experience hiring, coaching, and growing engineers
  • Comfort working through ambiguity and creating structure around broad technical problems
  • Clear communication skills and the ability to work across software, firmware, infrastructure, and engineering leadership

Bonus Points

  • Experience with Bazel, Buildkite, BuildBarn, AWS, Linux, Docker, or large monorepos
  • Experience with C++, Rust, Python, Go, or TypeScript
  • Experience supporting robotics, embedded systems, hardware-in-the-loop testing, or safety-critical software
  • Experience leading major build-system, CI-platform, or repository migrations

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!

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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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.

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