Senior Software Engineer (Maps Routing)

The Routing team determines how every Zipline aircraft moves through the world. You will design safe and efficient flight paths that guide Zips through complex, ever-changing airspace - navigating obstacles, uncertainty, and dynamic conditions in real time, with your work showing up in live flights every day

You will build optimization algorithms that compute the global set of routes executed autonomously by Zips - balancing reliability, throughput, and flight performance at scale. These systems operate in real time and must account for weather, airspace restrictions, vehicle performance, operational priorities, and dynamic demand

This is a highly visible, safety-critical function with direct operational impact. The systems you build determine how fast we deliver, how efficiently we scale, and how safely we operate in increasingly complex environments

Engineers on this team work at the intersection of autonomy, distributed systems, and real-world operations. You will collaborate closely with autonomy and flight operations teams to design and build systems that directly power flight operations

Build the brain of the delivery network. You’ll design systems that determine how aircraft move through real-world airspace at global scale

Real-world impact. Every improvement you make shows up in delivery speed, network throughput, and how reliably we operate

Deep technical challenges. Routing sits at the intersection of optimization, distributed systems, real-time decision-making, and high-reliability infrastructure

Real-time, high-availability services. Routing is a high-visibility service: low latency, deterministic behavior, strong SLAs, and robust fault-tolerance matter

AI-accelerated engineering. We leverage modern AI and agentic workflows to increase engineering velocity while maintaining strong system rigor

This role is ideal for engineers who enjoy combining algorithmic problem-solving with building high-reliability production systems that operate in the real world- We care far more about how you approach problems than experience with any specific technology. Strong candidates typically have:

Our current stack includes technologies such as Rust, Go, Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka, and AWS, but we value engineers who can learn quickly and focus on solving the right problems

We also lean heavily into AI-assisted engineering workflows and expect engineers to use modern tools to amplify productivity while maintaining high standards for system design and code quality

Ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams including autonomy and operations

Experience operating low-latency, high-availability production services

Comfort working on ambiguous, high-visibility / high-impact problems

Strong backend or distributed systems engineering fundamentals

Hands-on experience with path planning, graph search, motion planning, or related optimization problems

Extreme ownership mindset with a track record of driving projects end-to-end