Jobs and Careers

Software Engineer - Maps Routing

South San Francisco, United Statesfull_timeVerifiedPosted 22 Jul 2026

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.

About You and The Role

You are a senior software engineer on Routing: the team that computes safe, efficient, operational flight paths for every Zipline aircraft. Routing is a safety-critical, real-time service that turns operational priorities, vehicle performance, weather, airspace restrictions, and demand into the concrete routes flown by autonomous vehicles. Your work will directly affect delivery latency, fleet throughput, and operational safety across missions in live flight operations. You will operate at the intersection of optimization, autonomy, and distributed systems, shipping code that runs in production, responds to incidents, and iterates rapidly in partnership with flight operations, autonomy, and safety engineering.

What You'll Do

Own end-to-end design, implementation, and operation of core routing services that generate and schedule flight plans for the fleet.
Translate operational objectives (throughput targets, service-level priorities, safety constraints) into quantifiable optimization objectives and constraints; deliver routing outputs that meet those targets in production.
Implement and maintain algorithms for graph search, path planning, dynamic re-routing, and batching that run under strict latency and availability SLAs.
Build telemetry, test harnesses, and offline simulation pipelines to measure routing quality (e.g., average delivery latency, route success rate, reroute frequency, compute latency) and iterate based on quantified regressions.
Define and own production SLAs and SLOs for routing services (latency, availability, correctness) and drive improvements until targets are met.
Lead incident response for routing-related production outages: triage, mitigation, postmortem, and follow-up fixes; participate in on-call rotation as required to meet operational reliability targets.
Collaborate daily with Autonomy, Flight Operations, Safety, and Fleet Engineering to align route generation with vehicle constraints, certification requirements, and operational playbooks.
Mentor engineers, propose roadmap priorities, and make trade-off decisions about model complexity, compute budgets, and operational risk.

What You'll Bring

Title/level: Senior Software Engineer (routing/algorithms) — owner of production routing systems.
Location & logistics: in-office presence required at South San Francisco HQ; must be available for cross-team coordination and occasional early-morning or evening incident response. Travel to flight sites as needed for launches or operational troubleshooting (up to ~10% travel typical).
Must-have experience: 6+ years building and operating production distributed services and 3+ years shipping optimization/routing/path-planning code (graph search, motion planning, combinatorial optimization, or equivalent).
Proven production requirements: experience owning low-latency, high-availability services with measurable SLAs; on-call and incident management experience required.
Technical depth: strong algorithms and systems fundamentals; demonstrated ability to implement graph algorithms, constraint solvers, or heuristic optimizers that run at fleet scale and wi