Staff Embedded Linux Platform Engineer
Zipline
- Location
- Onsite (South San Francisco, California)
- Compensation
- $210k - $260k/yr
- Employment
- Full-time
- Level
- Senior Level
About the role
Zipline is the world’s largest autonomous drone delivery service, on a mission to ensure equal access to essential goods. This role involves owning the design and lifecycle of embedded middleware services for autonomous aircraft, setting technical direction for platform architecture, and ensuring reliable system performance in safety-critical environments.
Skills
Benefits
- Medical insurance
- Dental insurance
- Vision insurance
- Paid time off
Perks
- Equity compensation
- Performance bonuses
Full job details
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
Autonomous aircraft need onboard software that communicates, updates, reports health, and recovers predictably in safety-critical environments. The Embedded Platform team builds the middleware and infrastructure beneath the flight software stack on embedded Linux systems.
You will own shared platform capabilities from architecture through production delivery, with success measured by dependable updates, diagnosable failures, stable service interfaces, and reliable integration for flight-software teams. Senior engineers lead substantial services and integrations; Staff engineers set direction across platform boundaries, resolve architectural tradeoffs, and establish standards used across the shared stack.
What You'll Do
- Own the design, implementation, validation, and lifecycle of embedded middleware services for autonomous aircraft.
- Define and evolve IPC, communications-bridge, OTA-update, logging, observability, and service-lifecycle interfaces used across flight software.
- Deliver production Rust and C++ with testing, diagnostics, and maintainability built into each platform capability.
- Set technical direction for cross-service platform architecture, including interface decisions and tradeoffs that affect multiple flight-software teams.
- Partner with flight-software, hardware, and integration teams to ensure platform services operate reliably on embedded Linux aircraft systems.
- Investigate failures across software, operating-system, network, and hardware boundaries; drive corrective changes that improve reliability, performance, and operational visibility.
- Establish design-review and engineering practices that make services safer to deploy, easier to diagnose, and practical for downstream teams to adopt.
What You'll Bring
- 10+ years developing embedded, systems, or platform software in production environments.
- Strong Rust, C++, or comparable systems-programming skills, with experience delivering reliable software on embedded Linux.
- Working knowledge of concurrency, synchronization, networking, IPC, and distributed or multi-process systems.
- Ability to debug complex behavior across services, operating systems, networks, and hardware.
- Experience designing technical interfaces and carrying cross-functional integrations through delivery.
- For Staff-level scope, a record of leading architecture across multiple systems and influencing decisions beyond an individual component.
- Experience in aerospace, robotics, automotive, industrial, medical, or another high-reliability domain; autonomy, OTA, telemetry, Linux internals, or resource-constrained optimization are relevant.
What Else You Need To Know
The starting cash ranges for this role is $210,000 - $260,000. Please note that this is a target, starting cash range for a candidate who meets the minimum qualifications for this role. The final cash pay for this role will depend on a variety of factors, including a specific candidate's experience, qualifications, skills, working location, and projected impact. The total compensation package for this role may also include: equity compensation; discretionary annual or performance bonuses; sales incentives; benefits such as medical, dental and vision insurance; paid time off; and more. This position may be hired at one of three levels based on the candidate’s experience, skills, and demonstrated scope:
Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws or our own sensibilities.
We value diversity at Zipline and welcome applications from those who are traditionally underrepresented in tech. If you like the sound of this position but are not sure if you are the perfect fit, please apply!
Voluntary Self-Identification
For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.
As set forth in Zipline ’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.