flyzipline · South San Francisco, California, USA · South San Francisco, California, United States
<div class="content-intro"><h3>About Zipline</h3> <p>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. </p> <p>Our customers include the world’s largest and most prominent healthcare systems, governments, retailers, restaurants and global businesses who rely on us to save lives, reduce emissions, increase economic opportunity, and provide delivery 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.</p> <p>Our system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and gives people time back. With more than 140 million commercial autonomous miles safely flown, Zipline is redefining access to healthcare, consumer products, and food across the globe.</p> <p>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. We are seeking people who sculpt from first principles, enjoy facing adversity, and can do the impossible at record breaking speeds.</p></div><h1><strong>About You and The Role</strong></h1> <p>You will be the technical lead for Zipline’s strategic partner integrations, working directly with partner executives, product leaders, and engineering teams to bring drone delivery into their businesses. You will represent Zipline in leadership discussions, translate business priorities into technical decisions, and build alignment on integration scope, launch plans, and long-term roadmaps.</p> <p>This is a hands-on Staff Software Engineer role. You will own the architecture and build the APIs, SDKs, and integration capabilities that enable partners to launch reliable delivery experiences. You should be equally comfortable leading an architecture review with engineers and explaining launch readiness, risks, and tradeoffs to a partner’s executive team. Success means earning partner trust, delivering on shared commitments, and turning individual integrations into a platform that scales.</p> <h1><strong>What You’ll Do</strong></h1> <ul> <li><strong>Represent Zipline in partner leadership discussions.</strong> Lead conversations about technical strategy, launch readiness, and delivery risks. Translate complex issues into clear business implications, recommendations, and decisions.</li> <li><strong>Drive joint plans and commitments.</strong> Work with Commercial, Product, and partner teams to agree on scope, success criteria, milestones, and responsibilities. Surface dependencies early and negotiate practical tradeoffs when priorities or timelines change.</li> <li><strong>Enable partner experiences.</strong> Build frontend and backend SDKs that enable partners to build great customer experiences in their own apps, along with the integration framework, connector templates, and developer tooling to deliver partner API integrations quickly and consistently.</li> <li><strong>Set the platform architecture.</strong> Define clear interfaces between partner-specific connectors and Zipline’s core platform, keeping order lifecycle, authentication, authorization, data mapping, and monitoring consistent. Establish API and SDK versioning and compatibility practices so partners can adopt changes safely.</li> <li><strong>Make development self-service.</strong> Create sandbox environments, partner API simulators, and automated contract tests so engineering teams can develop and validate integrations independently.</li> <li><strong>Make launches repeatable.</strong> Establish integration acceptance criteria and automated release checks that verify correctness, failure handling, and operational readiness before production rollout.</li> <li><strong>Keep integrations reliable.</strong> Establish consistent retry, idempotency, and fallback behavior across partner APIs and webhooks. Define service reliability goals and own monitoring, runbooks, incident response, and remediation for integration failures.</li> <li><strong>Multiply engineering impact.</strong> Lead technical reviews and mentor engineers; use recurring implementation issues to improve the framework. Measure developer ramp time, integration delivery time, review effort, production defect rates, and SDK adoption to guide investment.</li> </ul> <h1><strong>What You’ll Bring</strong></h1> <ul> <li><strong>Staff-level delivery.</strong> 7+ years building and operating production backend or distributed systems, with demonstrated ownership of architecture and delivery across services and teams.</li> <li><strong>Developer platform experience.</strong> Experience building developer platforms, SDKs, or internal tooling used by other engineers to ship production software, ideally for external API integrations. You treat API usability, documentation, and compatibility as part of the product.</li> <li><strong>Distributed systems depth.</strong> Strong skills in API design, data modeling, asynchronous workflows, schema evolution, eventual consist