Staff Platform Software Engineer, AI Enablement
Zipline · San Francisco, United States · 2mo ago
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
Zipline operates autonomous delivery services that bring essential goods to customers and communities in the real world. As AI enables more teams to turn ideas into working software, we are hiring a Staff Platform Software Engineer to ensure that this new velocity strengthens—not jeopardizes—the systems that support our operations, deliveries, and customers.
You will build the scalable, secure interfaces that let AI-enabled applications and internal tools safely connect to Zipline’s production systems, including operationally critical services. Working closely with Forward Deployed AI Engineers, application teams, and infrastructure partners, you will define the platforms, standards, and guardrails that let teams ship quickly while protecting service reliability and the systems behind Zipline’s autonomy mission.
This is a hands-on role for an experienced application engineer who enjoys turning ambiguous, cross-functional problems into well-designed systems that other teams can confidently build upon.
What You'll Do
- Define and build the “paved road” for connecting AI-enabled applications and internal tools to production systems, including services that support delivery operations and customer experience.
- Design and implement reusable APIs, gateways, middleware, and integration patterns that are scalable, secure, observable, and straightforward for engineers to adopt.
- Partner early with Forward Deployed AI Engineers on high-impact projects, helping them select production-ready integration patterns and move successful prototypes into supported services.
- Own the technical decision for integrations that access protected production boundaries: approve the proposed design, require a safer redesign, or decline an integration that cannot meet Zipline’s standards for operational safety and reliability.
- Define and operate the platform safeguards that protect production systems—including authentication, authorization, workload isolation, rate limiting, auditability, capacity management, observability, alerting, graceful degradation, and safe failure modes.
- Establish clear technical standards and governance for how AI-enabled tools access production and operationally critical systems.
- Create reference implementations, documentation, and developer experiences that make the secure, supported path the easiest path to adopt.
- Partner with service-owning teams to ensure platform components and integrations have explicit ownership, operational expectations, and sustainable support models.
What Success Looks Like
- Teams building AI-enabled tools use well-defined, self-service integration patterns instead of creating one-off production connections.
- New applications can reach the production systems they need without weakening reliability, security, or the operational systems supporting Zipline’s delivery service.
- The platform is broadly adopted by Forward Deployed AI Engineers and application teams because it is practical, well-documented, and materially speeds up safe delivery.
- Production integrations have explicit service ownership, observability, capacity expectations, and safe operating boundaries.
- Integration risks are identified and resolved before they affect customers, delivery operations, or critical services.
What You'll Bring
- 8+ years of software engineering experience, including experience building and operating production applications at meaningful scale.
- Deep experience designing developer-facing APIs and distributed systems.
- Strong application engineering judgment, with a track record of translating product, customer, or operational needs into maintainable production software.
- Experience building cloud services and event-driven systems, including technologies such as Go, Protobuf, Kafka, and API-based service architectures.
- Experience designing for reliability, scale, and safe handling of high-volume or unpredictable traffic.
- Strong understanding of authentication, authorization, rate limiting, observability, and operational safety in production applications.
- A collaborative, pragmatic approach to technical leadership: you set a high bar for production readiness while helping teams make progress.
- Comfort using AI-assisted development tools as part of your engineering practice, along with the judgment to validate, harden, and operate the resulting systems.
Nice to Have
- Experience designing abuse-resistant or public-facing APIs.
- Experience with platform engineering, API gateways, service meshes, or developer platforms.
- Background in security engineering, application security, site reliability engineering, or incident response.
- Experience establishing technical standards or governance in a fast-moving engineering organization.
- Experience working with internal tools, data systems, or AI-enabled applications.
- Experience building systems that support real-world operations, logistics, autonomous systems, or other high-reliability services.
What Else You Need To Know
The starting cash range for this role is $185,000 - $240,000. 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; overtime pay; discretionary annual or performance bonuses; sales incentives; benefits such as medical, dental and vision insurance; paid time off; and more.
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.