Staff Software Engineer - Routing Engine

Why this role matters

The Routing team determines how every Zipline aircraft moves through the world. You will design safe and efficient flight paths that guide Zips through complex, ever-changing airspace - navigating obstacles, uncertainty, and dynamic conditions in real time, with your work showing up in live flights every day.

You will build optimization algorithms that compute the global set of routes executed autonomously by Zips - balancing reliability, throughput, and flight performance at scale. These systems operate in real time and must account for weather, airspace restrictions, vehicle performance, operational priorities, and dynamic demand.

This is a highly visible, safety-critical function with direct operational impact. The systems you build determine how fast we deliver, how efficiently we scale, and how safely we operate in increasingly complex environments.

Engineers on this team work at the intersection of autonomy, distributed systems, and real-world operations. You will collaborate closely with autonomy and flight operations teams to design and build systems that directly power flight operations.

Why This Role Is Unique

• Build the brain of the delivery network. You’ll design systems that determine how aircraft move through real-world airspace at global scale.
  
• Real-world impact. Every improvement you make shows up in delivery speed, network throughput, and how reliably we operate.
  
• Deep technical challenges. Routing sits at the intersection of optimization, distributed systems, real-time decision-making, and high-reliability infrastructure.
  
• Real-time, high-availability services. Routing is a high-visibility service: low latency, deterministic behavior, strong SLAs, and robust fault-tolerance matter.
  
• AI-accelerated engineering. We leverage modern AI and agentic workflows to increase engineering velocity while maintaining strong system rigor.

This role is ideal for engineers who enjoy combining algorithmic problem-solving with building high-reliability production systems that operate in the real world.

What you’ll bring

We care far more about how you approach problems than experience with any specific technology. Strong candidates typically have:

• Experience operating low-latency, high-availability production services
  
• Hands-on experience with path planning, graph search, motion planning, or related optimization problems
  
• Extreme ownership mindset with a track record of driving projects end-to-end
  
• Comfort working on ambiguous, high-visibility / high-impact problems
  
• Ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams including autonomy and operations
  
• Strong backend or distributed systems engineering fundamentals

Our current stack includes technologies such as Rust, Go, Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka, and AWS, but we value engineers who can learn quickly and focus on solving the right problems.

We also lean heavily into AI-assisted engineering workflows and expect engineers to use modern tools to amplify productivity while maintaining high standards for system design and code quality.

What Else You Need To Know

The starting cash ranges for this role is $220,000 - $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!