About the Role

Zipline operates the world’s largest autonomous logistics system (ground or air) — and in the coming year, we will be hyper-scaling from thousands to tens of thousands of carefully coordinated drone deliveries in several dense, dynamic U.S. metros. Our Autonomy Motion Planning team is looking for a Senior/Staff Software Engineer who is passionate about developing autonomous systems for the real world. This role will explore cutting-edge approaches to decision making and trajectory planning that will enable more accurate and timely deliveries, putting you in the position to make critical product decisions that will shape our future architectures.

What You'll Do

• Build real-time trajectory generation and decision-making for autonomous flight (search-based, sampling, MPC, convex/non-convex optimization).

• Design collision avoidance and large-scale multi-agent planning (fleet deconfliction, airspace rules, traffic management) that scales to 10,000+ flights/day.

• Tackle joint optimization across safety, energy, time, and reliability—balancing mission goals with vehicle/airspace constraints.

• Plan in uncertain environments with complex dynamics: chance-constraints, robustness to wind/turbulence, degraded sensors, and partial observability.

• Extend the autonomy stack for new aircraft and payloads; define clean interfaces with perception and controls.

• Prove it before flight: scenario libraries, SIL/HIL, large-scale sim, log replay, and fault-injection.

• Mine real fleet data to validate safety metrics (separation, risk, intervention rate), improve models, and burn down long-tail failure modes.

• Continuously reduce cost/latency (vectorization, warm starts, smart heuristics) while raising reliability.

What You'll Bring

• Master's degree in Computer Science or related field and 3+ years of experience building software for safety-critical systems (aerospace/AV/robotics/medical).

• Strong in Rust/C++/C for real-time, fault-tolerant code on embedded/Linux.

• Depth in planning & search (A*/ anytime / RRT*/sampling), trajectory optimization/MPC, or multi-agent deconfliction—shipped on real robots/vehicles.

• Hands-on with simulation at scale, SIL/HIL, log replay, and metrics-driven validation.

• Evidence of shipping production-grade autonomy through ambiguous, noisy conditions—owning the last mile to reliability.

• Systems thinker who collaborates tightly with perception, controls, and flight ops; crisp docs and design reviews.

Why Join Now?

• Impact at scale: Your planner won’t benchmark in isolation—it will fly thousands of missions/day delivering essential goods.

• Technical frontier: Real-time multi-agent autonomy, joint optimization, and robustness under uncertainty at a scale few have seen.

• Ownership: High-leverage IC role—your decisions shape Zipline’s flight stack and the behavior of a global fleet.

• Category leadership: Help define the standard for safe, reliable autonomous flight in the real world.