About the job
About Zipline
Are you ready to make a significant impact? Zipline is dedicated to revolutionizing the delivery of goods across the globe. Our mission is to tackle the most pressing access challenges by creating the first instant delivery and logistics system that ensures equal service to all individuals, regardless of their location. From facilitating Rwanda’s national blood delivery network and aiding Ghana’s COVID-19 vaccine distribution to offering on-demand home deliveries for Walmart and enabling healthcare providers to deliver care right to homes in the U.S., we are reshaping logistics for businesses, governments, and consumers alike. Our technology, while intricate, is driven by a straightforward vision: to provide an instantaneous delivery service that brings what you need, when you need it. By leveraging advanced robotics and autonomy, we are not only decarbonizing logistics but also alleviating road congestion and minimizing fossil fuel use and air pollution, while ensuring equitable access for billions and fostering a more robust global supply chain.
About You & the Role
You will take ownership of the flight-critical runtime that maintains the safety of Zipline's aircraft, regardless of external challenges. You’ll design and implement the autonomy safety layer responsible for mission orchestration, fault detection and diagnosis, as well as executing mitigation and recovery strategies across planning, perception, and controls. This position involves deep systems work in Rust/C++ under stringent real-time constraints, requiring high-stakes design decisions that are validated through SIL/HIL and flight logs, elevating the reliability of a global, safety-critical fleet.
What You’ll Do
Design the mission/flight manager: Develop state machines and orchestration logic that dictate mission sequencing, safe-state transitions, and behavior gating under various constraints.
Own fault management end-to-end: Implement detection, isolation, mitigation, and recovery (FIMR) strategies for sensors, compute, communications, power, and actuation systems; ensure graceful degradation and service continuity.
Ship flight-critical Rust/C++ code: Create and maintain essential onboard components with robust observability (health, logs, metrics) and testability (deterministic replay, assertions, invariants).
Prove safety prior to flight: Define success criteria and develop tools—including scenario libraries, SIL/HIL, log-replay harnesses, and fault injection—to validate behavior across edge cases and long-tail scenarios.
Integrate across autonomy domains: Collaborate with planning, perception, and controls teams to establish interfaces, hazards, and assumptions necessary for seamless operation.