Senior Cloud Release Engineer - Deployment & Validation Systems

Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced autonomous delivery service, founded to serve all humans equally by ensuring access to 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 including blood, vaccines, medical supplies, food, and commercial products. Our customers include healthcare systems, governments, retailers, and global brands who rely on us to save lives, reduce emissions, increase economic opportunity, and provide new logistics services at scale.

Our technology goes beyond drones. We deploy integrated logistics infrastructure that strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and enables instant delivery, transforming how essential goods reach people everywhere. 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.

About You and the Role:

As a Release Engineer at Zipline, you will play a crucial role in upgrading cloud validation and deployment validation systems. Zipline is operating a complex suite of services that interact with safety critical devices in the real world; in this role, you will help battle test and drive projects to improve confidence in system updates before we deploy to production. This role is essential for developing new systems and processes to ensure reliable software rollouts across increasingly complex changes and environments.

What You'll Do

• Develop Deployment and Validation Systems: Design and implement robust deployment strategies that ensure high reliability and stability in our software releases. Work with tools like Kubernetes and ArgoCD to manage the deployment lifecycle across multiple environments and namespaces. Incorporate integration validation and regression testing of cloud services into the deployment workflow to ensure that changes interact correctly with existing systems and do not introduce regressions.
• Lead Deployment Strategy Innovations: Spearhead initiatives to improve environment propagation and rollout mechanisms, drawing on proposals and current best practices within the industry to enhance our deployment philosophy. Ensure strategies include automated load test suites and integration checkpoints for cloud-native services.
• Own the service validation story: Create and manage pipelines for phased mutations of Kubernetes objects and infrastructure that represent services, ensuring deployments meet all testing and stability prerequisites before promotion to production environments. This includes load testing, running regression tests on fully deployed apps with shadowed traffic.
• Coordinate Across Teams: Work closely with all software teams to ensure that deployment strategies are aligned with the overall technical architecture and company objectives. Ensure clean slate deployments through effective coordination strategies akin to merge queues.
• Monitor and Optimize Release Systems: Implement and oversee monitoring tools such as Prometheus for continuous deployment assessments. Support developing comprehensive readiness and liveness probes for services to ensure operational integrity post-deployment.

What You'll Bring

• Extensive experience in release engineering, with a deep understanding of Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud-based deployment strategies.
• Proven ability to design and implement complex validation systems in a high-reliability environment.
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills to effectively work across multiple teams - loves working with your customer teams.
• Experience with monitoring tools (like prometheus, open telemetry) and deployment gating mechanisms.

What Else You Need to Know