About You and the Role
- Zipline is building the world’s largest autonomous logistics system, delivering vital medical and commercial supplies across the globe. As we scale our operations and extend into more complex, safety-critical environments, the ability to validate and prove our autonomy performance at scale becomes absolutely essential.
- We’re looking for a deeply technical software engineer to join the Autonomy Validation team — a core team responsible for building the infrastructure, tools, and frameworks that support software validation across the entire Autonomy organization. This includes planning, perception, control, and all of the decision-making logic that powers our self-flying aircraft.
- Our autonomy stack is highly custom-built, and while that gives us unmatched control and performance, it also means standard out-of-the-box testing tools don't work. In this role, you’ll take ownership of developing robust internal platforms for validation — enabling both simulation at scale and rigorous scenario testing — so that autonomy engineers can ship with confidence.
- This is not a QA role. It’s a foundational software engineering position building critical systems that will directly shape how we test, verify, and deploy autonomy safely around the world.
What You'll Do
- Build and own the infrastructure for validating autonomous features and system performance across planning, perception, and control.
- Design and develop simulation tools and scenario generation for large-scale and high-fidelity testing of autonomy under real-world and edge-case conditions.
- Develop custom tools for validation and testing of autonomy components that plug into our internal autonomy development stack.
- Create scalable, reliable, and automated solutions for running, tracking, and analyzing thousands of validation tasks across autonomy org.
- Collaborate deeply with:
- Autonomy engineers, to understand how system behavior should be evaluated.
- Systems and data engineers, to ensure metrics, safety thresholds, and requirements are codified in test infrastructure.
- Flight test and QA teams, to connect real-world results back into test tools and CI loops.
- Establish best practices for software release validation, helping ensure our autonomy stack is safe, measurable, and production-ready.
- Contribute to internal docs, standards, and validation workflows that scale across the autonomy organization.
- Autonomy engineers, to understand how system behavior should be evaluated.
- Systems and data engineers, to ensure metrics, safety thresholds, and requirements are codified in test infrastructure.
- Flight test and QA teams, to connect real-world results back into test tools and CI loops.
What You'll Bring
- 5+ years of experience building systems for testing, simulation, or safety validation — ideally in autonomy, aerospace, robotics, or other real-time, safety-critical environments.
- A strong software engineering foundation, including fluency in C++, Rust, C, or C#.
- Experience with custom simulation tools, game engines, or scenario generation frameworks.
- Familiarity with cloud infrastructure, containers, and distributed execution pipelines (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes, AWS).
- A track record of building tools or platforms used by other engineers — infrastructure that enables teams to move fast while maintaining safety and quality.
