Software Engineer (Maps Routing)

Join Zipline, a pioneering company in the field of drone delivery. As a Software Engineer on the Routing team, you will design and build systems that determine how our aircraft navigate complex airspace in real-time. Your work will have a direct impact on delivery speed, network throughput, and operational reliability. You will collaborate closely with autonomy and flight operations teams, and tackle deep technical challenges at the intersection of optimization, distributed systems, and real-time decision-making.

• Designing safe and efficient flight paths for Zipline aircraft, navigating obstacles and dynamic conditions in real time.
• Building optimization algorithms that compute the global set of routes executed autonomously by Zipline aircraft, balancing reliability, throughput, and flight performance.
• Collaborating closely with autonomy and flight operations teams to design and build systems that directly power flight operations, ensuring high-reliability production systems.
• This role is ideal for engineers who enjoy combining algorithmic problem-solving with building high-reliability production systems that operate in the real world
• We care far more about how you approach problems than experience with any specific technology. Strong candidates typically have:
• Strong backend or distributed systems engineering fundamentals
• Our current stack includes technologies such as Rust, Go, Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka, and AWS, but we value engineers who can learn quickly and focus on solving the right problems
• Hands-on experience with path planning, graph search, motion planning, or related optimization problems
• Ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams including autonomy and operations
• Extreme ownership mindset with a track record of driving projects end-to-end
• Experience operating low-latency, high-availability production services
• Comfort working on ambiguous, high-visibility / high-impact problems
• We also lean heavily into AI-assisted engineering workflows and expect engineers to use modern tools to amplify productivity while maintaining high standards for system design and code quality