Staff Software Engineer, Healthcare

Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service, on a mission to serve all humans equally by ensuring access to essential goods. The Staff Software Engineer will own critical software systems for fulfillment and flight workflows, collaborating with various teams to enhance operational efficiency and reliability.

Responsibilities:

• Own end-to-end software for fulfillment, maintenance, and flight workflows that support Zipline operations in Africa
• Partner with operations, supply chain, finance, and customer-facing teams to simplify workflows and resolve high-impact user problems
• Lead backend and frontend delivery for major projects, from architecture and data models through implementation and production rollout
• Design modular distributed and event-driven systems that can adapt as operational and business needs change
• Build automated unit, integration, and system testing that protects critical inventory, order, and flight-coordination workflows
• Improve production reliability, observability, and robustness so teams can identify issues and make sound operational decisions
• Raise engineering effectiveness through code review, design standards, mentoring, and AI-assisted development, testing, and operational workflows

Requirements:

• 10+ years building and operating production-grade distributed systems
• Deep full-stack development experience with Python, Go, or a similar object-oriented language, plus React or a comparable JavaScript framework
• Experience architecting distributed, event-driven systems using Kafka or similar technologies
• Strong database modeling and performance-tuning experience with Postgres
• A track record of designing software that is simple, flexible, resilient, and supported by comprehensive automated testing
• Experience making architectural decisions in a fast-changing operational environment and mentoring junior engineers through coaching, pairing, or design reviews
• Experience with fulfillment, logistics, or warehouse systems is valued
• Ability to travel 3-4 times a year to visit our operations in Africa; desire to travel more extensively or to relocate near our operations is a plus