Senior/Staff Cloud Infrastructure Engineer

📋 Job Overview

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.

🏢 About Zipline

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.

🎯 The Role

Zipline’s Infrastructure team builds and operates the software foundation that powers our global logistics network. We own the platforms that allow engineering teams to deploy, observe, communicate with, and safely operate services across cloud and physical environments.

This is not a “click around in managed services and call it infrastructure” role. We use cloud providers where they make sense, but we also care deeply about control, reliability, cost, latency, and operational resilience. That means we run and manage critical pieces of infrastructure ourselves. From our k8s clusters, to the server metal in the OnPrem clusters we manage.

We are building infrastructure for a company where software meets the physical world. When our systems work, medicine moves, food arrives, aircraft fly, operators have visibility, and customers get what they need. When they do not, the consequences are real. That is the fun part.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate foundational infrastructure used by engineering teams across Zipline.
• Own core platform capabilities across deployments, infrastructure as code, observability, networking, service-to-service communication, and runtime environments.
• Operate and evolve Zipline-managed Kubernetes clusters, including cluster lifecycle, reliability, scalability, security, and developer ergonomics.
• Build software and tooling that make infrastructure easier, safer, and faster for engineering teams to use.
• Partner with product, robotics, autonomy, fleet management, data, and operations teams to understand their infrastructure needs and turn recurring pain into durable platform abstractions.
• Improve the reliability and debuggability of distributed systems that span cloud services, physical infrastructure, and globally deployed operations.
• Evaluate new technologies pragmatically, separating durable leverage from hype.
• Participate in an on-call rotation for core infrastructure and improve the systems so on-call gets quieter over time.
• Raise the technical bar through design reviews, operational reviews, documentation, mentoring, and interviews.

📌 Required Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional experience designing, implementing and deploying cloud platforms to support internal and external business needs
• Hands-on experience operating production systems, not just provisioning them.
• Comfort working across the stack, from cloud APIs and Kubernetes controllers down to Linux, networking, storage, and runtime behavior.
• A bias toward automation, software-defined infrastructure, and eliminating repeated human toil.
• Sound judgment about when to use managed services, when to self-host, and when to build custom tooling.
• Strong debugging instincts for distributed systems, especially under time pressure.
• Clear written and verbal communication, with the ability to build trust across software, hardware, operations, and business teams.
• High standards for reliability, security, maintainability, and operational simplicity.
• Grit, resourcefulness, and resilience in ambiguous, fast-changing environments.
• Eligibility to work in the United States.

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Experience working with AWS
• Experience working with self-managed OnPrem servers
• Experience with Kubernetes
• Experience with event driven architectures (i.e. Kafka)

🎁 Benefits

The starting cash ranges for this role is $180,000 - $258,000. 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; discretionary annual or performance bonuses; sales incentives; benefits such as medical, dental and vision insurance; paid time off; and more.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

Eligibility to work in the United States.