Staff Software Engineer – Integrations Platform
Zipline · San Francisco, United States · 11h 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
As a Staff Software Engineer, you will own the technical direction of Zipline’s integrations platform as a hands-on individual contributor. You will shape the architecture and roadmap across teams, build production software, and enable engineers to deliver partner API integrations. You will create frontend and backend SDKs that enable partners to build great customer experiences in their own apps, alongside reusable connector patterns, development environments, and automated quality checks that help engineering teams build reliable integrations independently. Initial applications include POS and order-aggregation connectors, menu synchronization, and merchant workflows.
Your work will help unlock enterprise deals with major clients by making it easier to integrate with Zipline and launch reliable delivery experiences at scale. You will combine hands-on engineering with architecture and technical leadership, shortening the path from signed partnership to production launch and building a platform that supports Zipline’s commercial growth.
What You’ll Do
- Enable partner experiences. Build frontend and backend SDKs that enable partners to build great customer experiences in their own apps, along with the integration framework, connector templates, and developer tooling to deliver partner API integrations quickly and consistently.
- Set the platform architecture. Define clear interfaces between partner-specific connectors and Zipline’s core platform, keeping order lifecycle, authentication, authorization, data mapping, and monitoring consistent. Establish API and SDK versioning and compatibility practices so partners can adopt changes safely.
- Make development self-service. Create sandbox environments, partner API simulators, and automated contract tests so engineering teams can develop and validate integrations independently.
- Make launches repeatable. Establish integration acceptance criteria and automated release checks that verify correctness, failure handling, and operational readiness before production rollout.
- Simplify onboarding. Build documentation, reference implementations, and onboarding workflows that reduce developer ramp time and enable integrations to be completed with minimal support from core engineers.
- Keep integrations reliable. Establish consistent retry, idempotency, and fallback behavior across partner APIs and webhooks. Define service reliability goals and own monitoring, runbooks, incident response, and remediation for integration failures.
- Build for lasting scale. Evolve partner and partner-site data models to support long-term finance and operations requirements, making architecture decisions that reduce partner-specific workarounds.
- Multiply engineering impact. Lead technical reviews and mentor engineers; use recurring implementation issues to improve the framework. Measure developer ramp time, integration delivery time, review effort, production defect rates, and SDK adoption to guide investment.
- Guide enterprise launches. Work directly with partner engineers, Product, and Commercial to translate enterprise requirements into a platform roadmap, resolve technical blockers, and shorten the path from signed deal to production launch.
What You’ll Bring
- Staff-level delivery. 7+ years building and operating production backend or distributed systems, with demonstrated ownership of architecture and delivery across services and teams.
- Developer platform experience. Experience building developer platforms, SDKs, or internal tooling used by other engineers to ship production software, ideally for external API integrations. You treat API usability, documentation, and compatibility as part of the product.
- Distributed systems depth. Strong skills in API design, data modeling, asynchronous workflows, schema evolution, eventual consistency, and idempotent processing.
- Reusable integration design. Ability to turn varied external APIs into reusable connector patterns with clear boundaries and testable contracts, including experience with automated integration testing and development environments.
- Production accountability. Demonstrated production ownership, including observability, on-call support, incident investigation, and improvements that prevent recurring failures. You can show how your work improved reliability or reduced integration effort.
- Hands-on engineering depth. Deep proficiency in Go, Python, or a comparable backend language, with experience building libraries, command-line tools, or developer workflows that make other engineers productive.
- Frontend SDK judgment. Experience building or supporting frontend libraries, SDKs, or embedded customer experiences, with the ability to reason about client-side integration, authentication, error handling, and usability in partner apps.
- Leadership across teams. Define architecture and engineering standards across distributed engineering teams, enable independent execution through documentation and technical review, and align Product, Commercial, Finance, and Operations around platform priorities.
- Partner and product judgment. Communicate clearly with external engineering teams, turn ambiguous business needs into practical technical plans, and balance enterprise launch commitments with reusable platform investments.
- Thoughtful AI adoption. Use AI tools to improve implementation, testing, debugging, and review while taking responsibility for correctness, security, and maintainability.
What Else You Need To Know
The starting cash range for this role is $180,000 - $270,000. 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.