Autonomy Software Engineer, Validation Tools

Location: South San Francisco, California, USA

Department: Engineering

About You and the Role

Zipline is building the world’s largest autonomous logistics system, delivering vital medical and commercial supplies across the globe. As we scale our operations and extend into more complex, safety-critical environments, the ability to validate and prove our autonomy performance at scale becomes absolutely essential.

We’re looking for a deeply technical software engineer to join the Autonomy Validation team — a core team responsible for building the infrastructure, tools, and frameworks that support software validation across the entire Autonomy organization. This includes planning, perception, control, and all of the decision-making logic that powers our self-flying aircraft.

Our autonomy stack is highly custom-built, and while that gives us unmatched control and performance, it also means standard out-of-the-box testing tools don't work. In this role, you’ll take ownership of developing robust internal platforms for validation — enabling both simulation at scale and rigorous scenario testing — so that autonomy engineers can ship with confidence.

This is not a QA role. It’s a foundational software engineering position building critical systems that will directly shape how we test, verify, and deploy autonomy safely around the world.

What You'll Do

• Build and own the infrastructure for validating autonomous features and system performance across planning, perception, and control.
  
  
• Design and develop simulation tools and scenario generation for large-scale and high-fidelity testing of autonomy under real-world and edge-case conditions.
  
  
• Develop custom tools for validation and testing of autonomy components that plug into our internal autonomy development stack.
  
  
• Create scalable, reliable, and automated solutions for running, tracking, and analyzing thousands of validation tasks across autonomy org.
  
  
• Collaborate deeply with:
  
  
• Autonomy engineers, to understand how system behavior should be evaluated.
  
  
• Systems and data engineers, to ensure metrics, safety thresholds, and requirements are codified in test infrastructure.
  
  
• Flight test and QA teams, to connect real-world results back into test tools and CI loops.
  
  
• Establish best practices for software release validation, helping ensure our autonomy stack is safe, measurable, and production-ready.
  
  
• Contribute to internal docs, standards, and validation workflows that scale across the autonomy organization.
  
  

What You'll Bring

• 5+ years of experience building systems for testing, simulation, or safety validation — ideally in autonomy, aerospace, robotics, or other real-time, safety-critical environments.
  
  
• A strong software engineering foundation, including fluency in C++, Rust, C, or C#.
  
  
• Experience with custom simulation tools, game engines, or scenario generation frameworks.
  
  
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure, containers, and distributed execution pipelines (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes, AWS).
  
  

A track record of building tools or platforms used by other engineers — infrastructure that enables teams to move fast while maintaining safety and quality.

What Else You Need to Know