AI Tooling Software Engineer - Data Platform, Autonomy

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 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.

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.

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.

About You and The Role 

As an AI tooling engineer on the Autonomy team, you will build and scale the systems that help our teams visualize, annotate, debug, and extract signals from vehicles making real-world deliveries every day. These tools sit near the top of the data funnel and power the feedback loop that improves model and hardware performance and the customer experience. We are looking for an experienced software generalist or someone with exceptional depth in frontend or backend systems.

What You'll Do

• Build sophisticated, multimodal data triage and visualization interfaces for Zipline’s data pipelines so teams can investigate critical autonomy problems.
• Build scalable backend APIs and real-time data pipelines for querying, filtering, and aggregating large datasets.
• Design database schemas, indexes, and query strategies that keep search and analysis fast at scale.
• Partner with autonomy, service, maintenance, and operations teams to improve workflows and build tools for development, troubleshooting, and fleet health.

What You’ll Bring

• Experience building data-heavy web applications and improving performance with large datasets.
• Understanding of database query optimization and complex JSON or nested data structures.
• Experience designing backend APIs with frameworks such as Django, Flask, or FastAPI.
• Working knowledge of cloud databases such as AWS RDS or DocumentDB.

Nice to Have

• Experience with React, WebGL, or Three.js.
• Experience with platform engineering, API gateways, service meshes, or developer platforms.
• Background in security engineering, application security, site reliability engineering, or incident response.
• Experience establishing technical standards or governance in a fast-moving engineering organization.
• Experience with internal tools, data systems, or AI-enabled applications.
• Experience building systems for real-world operations, logistics, autonomous systems, or other high-reliability services.

What Else You Need To Know

The starting cash range for this role is $180,000 - $250,000. Please note that this is a target, starting cash range for a candidate who meets the minimum qualifications for this role. The final cash pay for this role will depend on a variety of factors, including a specific candidate's experience, qualifications, skills, working location, and projected impact. The total compensation package for this role may also include: equity compensation; overtime pay; discretionary annual or performance bonuses; sales incentives; benefits such as medical, dental and vision insurance; paid time off; and more.

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!

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.

As set forth in Zipline ’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.