---
title: 'Staff Platform Software Engineer, AI Enablement at Zipline'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-platform-software-engineer-ai-enablement-zipline-south-san-francisco-0xs4se4kv3ez'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-06'
---

# Staff Platform Software Engineer, AI Enablement at Zipline 

- **Company:** Zipline 
- **Location:** South San Francisco California, United States
- **Posted:** 2026-07-22
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-06
- **Apply:** https://www.zipline.com/open-roles/7812167003?gh_jid=7812167003

## 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 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.

## About Zipline 

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Zipline is an American robotics company that operates the world’s largest autonomous drone delivery service, transporting medical supplies, food, and retail goods across multiple continents.
- **Entity Type**: Private (early-stage startup)
- **Headquarters**: South San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: March 2014
- **Founders**: Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, Keenan Wyrobek, Ryan Oksenhorn, William Hetzler

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Logistics / Drone delivery
- **Target customers**: B2B (healthcare systems, governments, retailers like Walmart and Chipotle) and B2C (home delivery via the Zipline app)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: “Build the first logistics system that serves all people equally” – initially focused on saving lives by delivering blood and medicine to remote communities, now expanded to instant urban delivery.

## Products & Services
- **Platform 1 (P1)**: Long-range, rural delivery drone. Carries up to 4 lbs, roundtrip range 120+ miles, cruise speed 60 mph. Uses parachute delivery. Designed for enterprise, government, and healthcare supply chains.
- **Platform 2 (P2)**: Urban/suburban home delivery drone. Carries up to 8 lbs, service radius 10 miles (or 24 miles one way), cruise speed 70 mph. Delivers via a tether from up to 300 ft, allowing contactless drop-off. Launched in 2025 and used for food, retail, and health products.
- **Zipping Points**: Modular ground stations that allow businesses to load orders onto drones without specialized equipment.
- **FlightIQ**: Advanced onboard autonomy and perception suite for safe navigation and delivery.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available
- **Key Metric**: 2 million commercial deliveries completed (as of January 2026) and 130 million autonomous miles flown.[wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipline_(drone_delivery_company))[zipline-fact-sheet](https://www.zipline.com/about/zipline-fact-sheet)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not disclosed in available sources. Key partners include Walmart, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Crumbl, Blaze Pizza, Wendy’s, and many other restaurant brands. In healthcare, works with more than 5,000 hospitals and health centers.
- **Growth Signals**: Expanded into urban home delivery in 2025 (P2) with service in Pea Ridge, Arkansas and 20+ communities in Dallas-Fort Worth. Obtained FAA authorization for beyond visual line of sight operations. Reports 56% decrease in maternal mortality and 66% decrease in missed malaria treatments in served regions.[zipline-fact-sheet](https://www.zipline.com/about/zipline-fact-sheet)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Autonomous drone fleet**: One of the world’s largest commercial deployments of autonomous robots, with custom software running on Nvidia chips.
- **FAA approval**: All operations and aircraft are FAA-approved, including pioneering use of Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic Management (UTM).
- **Quieter than road vehicles**: Drones hover high and descend on a tether, generating noise lower than common neighborhood sounds.
- **Extensive testing**: One of the largest aviation testing campaigns, with operations in rain, wind, and storms.
- **Integrated logistics platform**: Beyond drones, Zipline provides warehousing, inventory management, cold chain storage, and fulfillment software.

## Strategic Focus
- Scaling the Platform 2 urban delivery network across the U.S., particularly through partnerships with major retailers and restaurants.
- Deepening healthcare impact by expanding into new countries and product categories (prescriptions, groceries, convenience items).
- Continuing to reduce delivery times and environmental footprint (0 emissions per delivery, compared to automotive delivery).

## Why Work Here
- **Culture values**: Ownership & Accountability, Direct Feedback & Communication, Continuous Improvement, Customer Obsession, Servant Leadership (as stated on careers page). Emphasis on “Make it matter” and mission-driven work.[careers](https://www.zipline.com/careers)
- **Work environment**: Headquartered in South San Francisco with hardware and software teams. The company assembles its drones in America. Likely on-site given the hardware focus; remote/hybrid policy not explicitly stated.
- **Impact**: Opportunity to work on life-saving technology (60,000+ lives saved) and shape the future of instant logistics.
- **Engineering culture**: Build and iterate on autonomous systems, airspace deconfliction, and large-scale robotics deployments.

## Sources
1. [Zipline Careers](https://www.zipline.com/careers)
2. [Zipline Homepage](https://www.zipline.com/)
3. [About Zipline](https://www.zipline.com/about)
4. [Zipline Fact Sheet](https://www.zipline.com/about/zipline-fact-sheet)
5. [Wikipedia - Zipline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipline_(drone_delivery_company))
6. [Greenhouse Careers Page](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/flyzipline)

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