Senior Field Systems Engineer - Software

ABOUT ZIPLINE 

Do you want to change the world? Zipline is on a mission to transform the way goods move. Our aim is to solve the world’s most urgent and complex access challenges by building, manufacturing, and operating the first instant delivery and logistics system that serves all humans equally, wherever they are. From powering Rwanda’s national blood delivery network and Ghana’s COVID-19 vaccine distribution, to providing on-demand home delivery for Walmart and enabling healthcare providers to bring care directly to U.S. homes, we are transforming the way things move for businesses, governments, and consumers. The technology is complex but the idea is simple: a teleportation service that delivers what you need, when you need it, with zero emissions.

Join Zipline and help us to make good on our promise to build an equitable and more resilient global supply chain for billions of people.

ABOUT YOU AND THE ROLE  

Are you eager to apply your technical skills to solve real-world problems and drive meaningful change? Do you thrive in environments where you're given ownership, creative freedom, and complex challenges to tackle? If so, join our Field Systems Engineering team at Zipline—where your work directly impacts lives every day.

Zipline’s long-range drone platform began operations in Rwanda in 2016. With a fixed-wing design capable of flying over 200 km on a single charge, our drones enable fast, reliable delivery of critical medical supplies to remote communities. From helping new mothers in Rwanda to saving snake bite victims in Ghana, Zipline’s technology has already served millions across the African continent—delivering thousands of life-saving products daily.

The Field Systems Engineering (FSE) team operates at the intersection of Engineering and Operations. We ensure that the equipment we design is safe, robust, and reliable—because lives depend on it. As a Field Systems Engineer focused on Software, you’ll play a crucial role in optimizing the performance and reliability of our long-range drone systems.

In this role, you’ll work closely with a range of cross-functional engineers and flight operators to identify friction points in how our software supports daily operations for our Platform 1 vehicle that is supporting operations around the world. You’ll lead anomaly investigations, define data-driven requirements, and drive execution of improvement projects to enhance system reliability, ease of maintenance, and overall usability. Whether you're implementing direct software improvements or coordinating efforts across multiple teams, your goal is to ensure the platform runs smoothly and efficiently. At times, you’ll step into a technical program management role—helping unblock other engineers, align priorities, and drive key projects forward. Success in this role requires an entrepreneurial mindset, strong technical foundation, excellent communication skills, and the ability to translate between the needs of operators in the field and the engineers building the system. If you thrive at the intersection of software and real-world impact, and enjoy bringing clarity and progress to complex systems, you’ll feel right at home here.

WHAT YOU'LL DO 

• Optimize and improve a complex, real-world system used daily by operators—delivering timely solutions while ensuring all changes are thoroughly validated for safety and reliability.
• Travel to our international operations centers to understand how the system works in the real world.
• Become the go-to expert on the existing flight software stack, along with its development, testing, and deployment tools.
• Support triage and risk assessment of emergent technical issues, balancing urgency with sound engineering judgment.
• Lead new projects to drive operations efficiency and increase system robustness.
• Drive data-driven analysis of system behavior using tools like Databricks to diagnose issues, evaluate performance, and quantify the impact of improvements.
• Build and maintain strong working relationships across the organization—from operations and systems engineering to software leads and regulatory partners.
• Identify, document, and drive improvements to the software development and deployment lifecycle for the long-range drone platform.
• Collaborate across teams—global operations, engineering, and leadership—to shape the strategic software roadmap for the platform.
• Design, coordinate, and execute high-impact testing campaigns that validate new features, improvements, or fixes in real-world conditions.