Senior Software Engineer, ASW Launch Ops

Zipline is a global drone delivery service that operates an autonomous logistics system delivering food, medicine, and essential goods. The Senior Software Engineer will build and own an operational platform supporting site acquisition, permitting, infrastructure design, construction, deployment tracking, and launch readiness while replacing fragmented manual workflows with scalable, auditable software. The role includes designing APIs and architectures, building integrations and workflows, operating business-critical services, and leading cross-functional technical initiatives.

Responsibilities:

• Drive core product domains. Serve as a technical owner for critical capabilities across site acquisition, permitting, infrastructure design, construction execution, deployment tracking, and launch readiness—ensuring their long-term technical health and strategic direction
• Deliver measurable impact. Reduce manual coordination, shorten site-launch timelines, improve launch-date predictability, and give cross-functional leaders clear visibility into execution, dependencies, and risk
• Lead technical design. Define the APIs, data models, service boundaries, and architectural patterns that power the platform, with a focus on maintainability, auditability, observability, and pragmatic evolution
• Build durable operational workflows. Translate complex real-world processes into software that supports long-running workflows, government and vendor interactions, physical assets, documents and permits, approvals, dependencies, state transitions, and exception handling
• Create a unified operational source of truth. Build resilient integrations across ERP, GIS, document management, permitting, construction and project management, asset management, and internal operational systems
• Design for the people doing the work. Partner directly with users to turn fragmented processes and data into intuitive tools for planning and execution. Prototype workflows, validate them in real operating environments, and drive adoption
• Own production excellence. Build and operate business-critical services with meaningful health metrics, SLOs, observability, runbooks, and recovery mechanisms. Participate in on-call, lead incident response when needed, and improve systems through thoughtful postmortems
• Remain deeply hands-on. Ship production code, review critical changes, troubleshoot complex system behavior, and follow major capabilities from discovery through deployment and operation
• Lead through influence. Create clarity in ambiguous problem spaces, identify systemic risks and cross-team dependencies, and drive alignment across technical and operational stakeholders
• Elevate the team. Mentor peers, raise engineering standards, and strengthen practices in system design, automated testing, CI/CD, operational reliability, and pragmatic delivery

Requirements:

• At least 5 years of professional experience developing and maintaining full-stack production systems at scale, or demonstrated equivalent technical mastery
• You understand user needs, identify root causes, and design pragmatic solutions that balance business value, usability, technical simplicity, and long-term maintainability
• You can break down ambiguous operational problems, collaborate with stakeholders to define the right solution, and deliver software that improves real-world processes
• You design maintainable systems, model data thoughtfully, create robust APIs, and make sound tradeoffs across frontend applications, backend services, distributed systems, and infrastructure
• You have modeled long-running workflows, external dependencies, physical assets, and complex state transitions with strong auditability, observability, and failure recovery
• You have built reliable integrations between internal services and external or enterprise systems
• You are comfortable learning and working across technologies such as Python, Go, PostgreSQL, React, Kafka, gRPC, AWS, Grafana, and Honeycomb
• We value engineers who learn new tools quickly over experience with every specific technology
• You use AI thoughtfully throughout the development lifecycle—including design, implementation, testing, debugging, and code review—while maintaining strong engineering judgment and quality
• You define meaningful service-health metrics and reliability goals, create actionable runbooks, participate in on-call rotations, and drive improvements through incident reviews
• You have shipped high-impact capabilities that reduce manual intervention, shorten cycle times, increase predictability, improve throughput, or strengthen reliability—and can demonstrate the results with concrete metrics
• You communicate clearly under ambiguity, prioritize decisively, and influence stakeholders across engineering and operational organizations without relying on formal authority
• You balance speed with correctness and understand the real operational consequences of software used to deploy physical infrastructure and support safety-critical operations
• This role can be based in South San Francisco or remotely within the United States
• Regular travel is expected so that you can work closely with stakeholders, understand operational challenges firsthand, and build software grounded in real-world workflows
• Travel may include visits to Zipline headquarters, operating sites, and new-market launches
• Remote team members should expect more frequent travel—typically a few days at a time, potentially once per month
• Experience with ERP, GIS, document management, construction, permitting, or asset management systems is valuable but not required