Senior Motion Planning Software Engineer
Company: Zipline
Location: South San Francisco
Posted on: April 1, 2026
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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 operates the world’s largest autonomous
logistics system (ground or air) — and in the coming year, we will
be hyper-scaling from thousands to tens of thousands of carefully
coordinated drone deliveries in several dense, dynamic U.S. metros.
Our Autonomy Motion Planning team is looking for a Senior/Staff
Software Engineer who is passionate about developing autonomous
systems for the real world. This role will explore cutting-edge
approaches to decision making and trajectory planning that will
enable more accurate and timely deliveries, putting you in the
position to make critical product decisions that will shape our
future architectures. What You'll Do Build real-time trajectory
generation and decision-making for autonomous flight (search-based,
sampling, MPC, convex/non-convex optimization). Design collision
avoidance and large-scale multi-agent planning (fleet
deconfliction, airspace rules, traffic management) that scales to
10,000 flights/day. Tackle joint optimization across safety,
energy, time, and reliability—balancing mission goals with
vehicle/airspace constraints. Plan in uncertain environments with
complex dynamics: chance-constraints, robustness to
wind/turbulence, degraded sensors, and partial observability.
Extend the autonomy stack for new aircraft and payloads; define
clean interfaces with perception and controls. Prove it before
flight: scenario libraries, SIL/HIL, large-scale sim, log replay,
and fault-injection. Mine real fleet data to validate safety
metrics (separation, risk, intervention rate), improve models, and
burn down long-tail failure modes. Continuously reduce cost/latency
(vectorization, warm starts, smart heuristics) while raising
reliability. What You'll Bring Master's degree in Computer Science
or related field and 3 years of experience building software for
safety-critical systems (aerospace/AV/robotics/medical). Strong in
Rust/C++/C for real-time, fault-tolerant code on embedded/Linux.
Depth in planning & search (A*/ anytime / RRT*/sampling),
trajectory optimization/MPC, or multi-agent deconfliction—shipped
on real robots/vehicles. Hands-on with simulation at scale,
SIL/HIL, log replay, and metrics-driven validation. Evidence of
shipping production-grade autonomy through ambiguous, noisy
conditions—owning the last mile to reliability. Systems thinker who
collaborates tightly with perception, controls, and flight ops;
crisp docs and design reviews. Why Join Now? Impact at scale: Your
planner won’t benchmark in isolation—it will fly thousands of
missions/day delivering essential goods. Technical frontier:
Real-time multi-agent autonomy, joint optimization, and robustness
under uncertainty at a scale few have seen. Ownership:
High-leverage IC role—your decisions shape Zipline’s flight stack
and the behavior of a global fleet. Category leadership: Help
define the standard for safe, reliable autonomous flight in the
real world. What Else You Need to Know The starting cash range for
this role is $200,000 - $265,000; please note that this is a
target, starting cash range for a candidate who meets the minimum
qualifications for this role. We are always open to negotiation.
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, Turlock , Senior Motion Planning Software Engineer, Engineering , South San Francisco, California
