Senior Motion Planning Software Engineer

Senior Motion Planning Software Engineer Location: South San Francisco, California, USA. 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 that rely on us to save lives, reduce emissions, increase economic opportunity, and deliver 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. With more than 140 million commercial autonomous miles safely flown, Zipline is redefining access to healthcare, consumer products, and food across the globe. About the Role Our Autonomy Motion Planning team is looking for a Senior 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 simulation, log replay, and fault‑injection. Mine real fleet data to validate safety metrics (separation, risk, intervention rate), improve models, and reduce 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. Benefits Impact at scale: Your planner 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. Starting total compensation includes base salary ($200,000 – $245,000), equity, bonuses, and benefits such as medical, dental, vision insurance, paid time off, etc. Zipline is an equal‑opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment. No discrimination on race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, disability, gender, age, marital status, military service, citizenship, or other characteristics protected by law. #J-18808-Ljbffr