About the role
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 a Staff Software Engineer on the Nest Applications team, you will lead the evolution of the systems behind reliable healthcare delivery operations. You will own major technical decisions across interconnected operational workflows and help build software that remains simple, resilient, and adaptable as the network grows.
This is a hands-on, product-oriented full-stack role with deep backend ownership. We are looking for an engineer who brings exceptional Go expertise and can raise the technical bar across APIs, integrations, distributed systems, and engineering practices.
What You'll Do
* Own end-to-end software for fulfillment, maintenance, inventory, and flight workflows. * Lead architecture across multiple teams, from data models and API contracts through implementation, rollout, and ongoing operation. * Design robust APIs, backend services, and integration patterns that connect field operations, internal teams, and customer-facing products. * Build modular, event-driven systems that can evolve with operational and business needs. * Improve reliability, observability, automated testing, and operational decision-making for critical workflows. * Establish strong engineering standards through design reviews, code review, mentoring, and technical leadership. * Partner directly with operations, supply chain, finance, and customer-facing teams to resolve high-impact problems.
What You'll Bring
* 10+ years of production software engineering experience, including staff-level technical scope. * Experience in both a high-engineering-bar organization where you worked at scale AND a startup or scale-up environment where you built from the ground up, with limited devops support and handled fast pace and ambiguity. * Deep production expertise in Go; you should be able to set technical direction for our backend services and develop other engineers’ Go capability. * Experience designing and operating distributed, event-driven systems; Kafka or comparable technologies are strongly relevant. * Strong database design and performance experience, including Postgres. * A record of owning architecture across teams, leading significant migrations, mentoring engineers, and working directly with customers or external stakeholders. * Clear, effective communication in English. * Ability to work from the US East Coast or London, UK, and travel to Africa approximately three times per year.
Additional Valuable Experience
* Integrating with external partner APIs or partner systems. * Designing reliable integrations points and API contracts, authentication, error handling, observability, and integration workflows. * Healthcare, fulfillment, logistics, warehouse-management, or e-commerce systems.
What Else You Need To Know
For US-based candidates, the starting cash range for this role is $180,000 - $220,000. 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.