Jobs and Careers

Senior Software Systems Validation Engineer

South San Francisco, United Statesfull_timeVerifiedPosted 27 May 2026

💰 $250,000/yr($150,000/yr – $250,000/yr)

About the role

About Zipline

Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service. We are on a mission to serve all humans equally by ensuring access to food, medicine and essential goods anytime, anywhere. We design, build, and operate the world’s largest autonomous logistics system, delivering critical supplies quickly and reliably. Today, Zipline operates on four continents, makes a delivery somewhere in the world every 30 seconds, and has completed millions of deliveries to date, including blood, vaccines, medical supplies, food, and retail products.

Our customers include the world’s largest and most prominent healthcare systems, governments, retailers, restaurants and global businesses who rely on us to save lives, reduce emissions, increase economic opportunity, and provide delivery from point A to point B as fast as possible. The drone is only 15% of what we’ve built to enable seamless, reliable, global operations.

Our system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and gives people time back. With more than 140 million commercial autonomous miles safely flown, Zipline is redefining access to healthcare, consumer products, and food across the globe.

We operate at a global scale and are looking for practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth. Our team is motivated by building systems that have a direct, meaningful impact on people’s lives and by scaling the future of logistics. We are seeking people who sculpt from first principles, enjoy facing adversity, and can do the impossible at record breaking speeds.

ROLE EXPECTATIONS

As a Senior Software Systems Validation Engineer you will lead end-to-end software evaluation of Zipline’s autonomous drone delivery system. This system spans various domains, including sensor drivers, perception, navigation, guidance and control, motion planning, power management and actuator control.

As part of this evaluation, you will build tools, metrics and visualizations that highlight capability improvements, gaps, and regressions, and ultimately fast track engineering decision making for large scale deployments and operating domain expansion. Your scope may include aircraft performance, delivery operations, docking systems, and fleet orchestration.

You will evaluate and continuously improve validation practices, identifying areas where improvements to tools, methodologies, and processes can increase validation coverage, efficiency and precision while maintaining high development and deployment velocity. For this, you will collaborate closely with our embedded and autonomy software teams, systems engineering, data platform and test infrastructure teams, and ensure that our software behaviors function as intended in real-world scenarios.

You will, thus, be the bridge between Systems Engineering and Software Development at Zipline.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

Validate system requirements and contribute to the iteration of software requirements.
Collaborate with systems engineers and software teams to define system-level validation strategies
Design, implement, and execute test scenarios for Zipline’s end-to-end autonomous drone delivery software stack from simulation to full system (flight) test.
Lead software systems validation strategy, focused on system-level performance, reliability, and safety.
Build software performance and safety monitors that operate reliably in real-time systems.
Collaborate with test infrastructure and data platform teams to architect and build frameworks and tools that enable large-scale automated system validation.
Debug complex validation failures spanning simulation, hardware, firmware, embedded software and application software.

WHAT YOU’LL BRING

- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or related field.
- 5+ years of Software Development, Software Systems Engineering or Software Validation experience working with robotic systems, and deeper experience in at least 1 of the following: Perception, Motion Planning, Navigation, Control or Estimation & Dynamics.
- Experience developing nominal, adversarial, stress and edge case testing for robotics applications.
- Experience working with large data sets in production pipelines
- Experience root causing failures in complex, autonomous, robotic systems.
- Proficiency in scripting (python, sql) and programming languages for safety critical applications (MISRA C, Rust, C++).
- Bonus
  - Experience with risk assessment tools and techniques (STPA , HARA).
  - Experience with standards DO-178C , ISO26262, ISO 21448, ARP 4761, ARP 4754.
  - Background in reliability engineering / statistical validation techn