Software Engineer - Maps Routing

About You and The Role 

You are a senior software engineer on Routing: the team that computes safe, efficient, operational flight paths for every Zipline aircraft. Routing is a safety-critical, real-time service that turns operational priorities, vehicle performance, weather, airspace restrictions, and demand into the concrete routes flown by autonomous vehicles. Your work will directly affect delivery latency, fleet throughput, and operational safety across missions in live flight operations. You will operate at the intersection of optimization, autonomy, and distributed systems, shipping code that runs in production, responds to incidents, and iterates rapidly in partnership with flight operations, autonomy, and safety engineering.

What You'll Do 

• Own end-to-end design, implementation, and operation of core routing services that generate and schedule flight plans for the fleet.
• Translate operational objectives (throughput targets, service-level priorities, safety constraints) into quantifiable optimization objectives and constraints; deliver routing outputs that meet those targets in production.
• Implement and maintain algorithms for graph search, path planning, dynamic re-routing, and batching that run under strict latency and availability SLAs.
• Build telemetry, test harnesses, and offline simulation pipelines to measure routing quality (e.g., average delivery latency, route success rate, reroute frequency, compute latency) and iterate based on quantified regressions.
• Define and own production SLAs and SLOs for routing services (latency, availability, correctness) and drive improvements until targets are met.
• Lead incident response for routing-related production outages: triage, mitigation, postmortem, and follow-up fixes; participate in on-call rotation as required to meet operational reliability targets.
• Collaborate daily with Autonomy, Flight Operations, Safety, and Fleet Engineering to align route generation with vehicle constraints, certification requirements, and operational playbooks.
• Mentor engineers, propose roadmap priorities, and make trade-off decisions about model complexity, compute budgets, and operational risk.

What You'll Bring

• Title/level: Senior Software Engineer (routing/algorithms) — owner of production routing systems.
• Location & logistics: in-office presence required at South San Francisco HQ; must be available for cross-team coordination and occasional early-morning or evening incident response. Travel to flight sites as needed for launches or operational troubleshooting (up to ~10% travel typical).
• Must-have experience: 6+ years building and operating production distributed services and 3+ years shipping optimization/routing/path-planning code (graph search, motion planning, combinatorial optimization, or equivalent).
• Proven production requirements: experience owning low-latency, high-availability services with measurable SLAs; on-call and incident management experience required.
• Technical depth: strong algorithms and systems fundamentals; demonstrated ability to implement graph algorithms, constraint solvers, or heuristic optimizers that run at fleet scale and within tight latency budgets.
• Safety & ops: experience integrating runtime safety constraints and operational limits into online decision systems; familiarity with validation, simulation-driven verification, or safety review processes preferred.
• Tooling & languages: production experience in systems languages or high-performance back-end stacks (examples in our environment: Rust, Go, C++, or equivalent); familiarity with containerized deployment, CI, and production telemetry.
• Outcomes-oriented: track record of shipping measurable improvements to latency, throughput, success rate, or other quantitative operational metrics.
• Soft constraints: clear communicator able to drive cross-functional trade-offs; comfortable making decisions under operational pressure.
• Hard constraints we will verify in screening: production routing/optimization ownership, on-call/incident experience, in-office South San Francisco baseline, and demonstrated ability to ship low-latency services that meet quantitative SLAs.

What Else You Need To Know

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!