Software Engineer, Test Infrastructure

📋 Job Overview

Zipline is looking for software engineers to build the tools and infrastructure that power our systems validation and flight test organizations. This team develops precise, efficient, and scalable software solutions used to validate aircraft and ground systems at every level.

🏢 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.

🎯 The Role

Our work spans everything from integrating real avionics, sensors, actuators, and radios with high-fidelity simulated environments in bench-top Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) setups, to building applications that plan, orchestrate, and evaluate thousands of automated nominal and off-nominal real-world flight tests every day. This role directly impacts the speed, confidence, and quality of hardware and software development at Zipline.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain HIL test infrastructure that integrates real aircraft hardware with simulated systems and environments.
• Develop software tools, frameworks, and services to enable large-scale automated and semi-automated system validation.
• Support a high-throughput flight test organization running thousands of daily tests, from targeted regression tests to rare off-nominal scenarios.
• Write and maintain test software, drivers, and interfaces for embedded and Linux-based systems.
• Support test framework architecture designs and improvements.
• Debug complex validation failures spanning simulation, hardware, firmware, and application software
• Collaborate with flight test engineers, systems engineers, avionics, autonomy and embedded software teams to define system-level validation strategies.
• Improve test reliability, debuggability, and signal-to-noise as systems and test volume scale.

📌 Required Qualifications

• 4+ years of experience in software engineering for complex, hardware-backed, safety-critical systems.
• Extensive experience in Python, specifically using test systems (e.g. pytest)
• Experience testing Rust and/or C embedded systems.
• Extensive experience working with CI/CD.
• Experience developing and executing test plans for complex, safety critical, embedded and cloud software.
• Strong problem-solving and ability to quickly learn a new system for testing purposes

🎁 Benefits

The starting cash range for this role is $130,000 - 230,000. 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.

• Software Engineer, Test Infrastructure: $130,000–$190,000
• Senior Software Engineer, Test Infrastructure: $170,000–$230,000

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

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.