Senior Software Engineer – Developer Productivity

Company: Zipline
Location: South San Francisco
Posted on: April 1, 2026

Job Description:

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 The Role Zipline's software team is dedicated to rapidly delivering safety-critical software for our delivery drones. As a small team of software engineers, we build the essential tools that ensure a seamless development process. In this role, you will collaborate closely with software engineers across various domains, including autonomy, firmware, flight software, avionics, and simulation. Your responsibilities will involve enhancing our CI/CD system, empowering teams to gain deeper insights from their PR workflows, and maintaining a smooth development flow. This position offers a dynamic blend of high-level strategic planning, such as identifying key investments and evaluating new tools, and deep dives into our codebase for debugging and improvements. You will also engage in customer-centric work, partnering with other software engineers on critical infrastructure, designing new pipelines, and facilitating code migrations to new platforms. What You'll Do Own our monorepo CI/CD pipelines (Github Action, Buildkite) Maintain observability stack (Datadog, Grafana) Improve the speed and reliability of our CI/CD pipeline (Bazel caching and remote execution) Collaborate with engineers to materialize their CI requirements Implement and operate bazel remote execution for custom hardware and cloud native environments Build tooling to support engineering test flights Improve the code review process and align company wide Build bots and automation that delight the team What You'll Bring 8 years of experience in a software development role at engineering-led companies Expertise in developer tooling, modern tools and best practices A generalist mindset, with excitement to own problems end-to-end A customer-centric mindset, with an ability to quickly embed with other engineers and regularly pair program Strong, defensible opinions on what makes an excellent software development experience What Else You Need to Know This role is an in-office opportunity based out of our South San Francisco HQ. The starting cash range for this role is $170,000-210,000. 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. Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, mental or physical disability, medical condition, genetic information, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, military or veteran status, citizenship, or other characteristics protected by state, federal or local law or our other policies. 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!

Keywords: Zipline, San Leandro , Senior Software Engineer – Developer Productivity, Engineering , South San Francisco, California