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.
Joining Zipline as a Software Engineer Intern on the Enterprise Systems team, you will be part of the Application Software organization. You will take full ownership of the operational nervous system that powers everything from manufacturing and supply chain to inventory traceability and field deployment. This software is the critical infrastructure used daily by our technicians, planners, and manufacturing teams to ensure global production reliability. You will work directly with hardware and operations partners to lead technical designs and deploy high-availability services where correctness is vital for safety and aircraft throughput.
What You'll Do- Drive core product domains. You will be the primary architect and owner for critical systems driving Manufacturing Execution, Supply Chain, Finance, Parts Traceability, and Inventory, ensuring their long-term technical health and strategic direction.
- Deliver measurable impact. Within your first year, you will stabilize essential services to 99.9% uptime, slash manual planning and production interventions by over 50%, and deploy a comprehensive traceability pipeline that tracks the vast majority of our manufactured assets.
- Lead technical design. You’ll define the APIs, data models, and service boundaries that power our operations, while prioritizing observability through metrics, SLAs, and robust runbooks.
- Bridge hardware and software. You will build resilient integrations between our digital services and physical hardware tooling, driving direct handoffs and ensuring our systems remain deterministic even during intermittent network connectivity.
- Own production excellence. Engineers participate in an on-call rotation to maintain high-availability services, leading incident response and driving continuous improvement through deep-dive postmortems.
- Embedded discovery. You’ll work directly on the shop floor with manufacturing, supply chain, and flight ops teams to prototype workflows and drive the adoption of new operational tools.
- Elevate the team. You will mentor peers and refine our CI/CD and automated testing practices to ensure that deployments remain safe and repeatable in our unique hardware-integrated environment.
- You must have completed the second year of your undergraduate studies in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field. Masters and PhD students are also eligible.
- Product-minded engineering. You excel at understanding user needs, identifying root causes, and designing pragmatic solutions that balance business value with technical simplicity.
- Systems perspective. You break down ambiguous operational problems, collaborate with stakeholders to define the right solution, and deliver software that improves real-world processes.
- Strong technical fundamentals. You design maintainable systems, model data thoughtfully, make sound technical tradeoffs, and use AI effectively to accelerate development while maintaining high quality.
- Modern technology stack. You'll work across Python, Go, PostgreSQL, React, Kafka, gRPC, AWS, Grafana, and Honeycomb, using AI throughout the development lifecycle for design, implementation, testing, debugging, and code review. We value engineers who learn new tools quickly over experience with any specific technology.
- Operational excellence. You define meaningful service health metrics and reliability goals, create operational runbooks, participate in on-call rotations, and drive improvements through incident reviews.
- Quantifiable results. You have a track record of shipping high-impact features that reduce manual intervention and boost throughput, backed by concrete metrics like downtime reduction or significant time savings.
- Collaboration and discovery. This role requires regular on-site presence at our engineering or operations hubs to partner with cross-functional teams. When local, expect 5 days per week in-office, on the manufacturing floor, or at a test/commercial operations site. You are open to traveling up to 15% annually to be in close proximity to users and stakeholders.
- Owner’s mindset. You are a decisive engineer who balances velocity with absolute correctness. You understand the direct operational consequences of your code in a safety-critical, hardware-integrated environment.
Assuming this position, you will take full ownership of a mission-critical operational nervous system from day one. Your mandate involves delivering quantifiable results in system reliability and aircraft throughput within your first year, while managing SLO-driven services in close partnership with our physical hardware and field operations teams.
What Else You Should KnowThis internship is a full-time position, in-person at our South San Francisco office. We will host our Spring 2027 interns from January to April.
The hourly rate for this internship is $54 per hour. Additional benefits may include relocation support, a housing stipend, overtime pay, paid sick time, and other benefits, where applicable and subject to local requirements.
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.
Zipline is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities. Please let your point of contact at Zipline know if you require any accommodations throughout your interview process.
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.
Skills Required
- Completed the second year of an undergraduate degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field
- Masters and PhD students are eligible
- Strong software engineering fundamentals, including maintainable system design, thoughtful data modeling, and sound technical tradeoffs
- Ability to understand user needs, identify root causes, and design pragmatic product-minded solutions
- Ability to break down ambiguous operational problems and collaborate with stakeholders
- Experience or ability to work with Python, Go, PostgreSQL, React, Kafka, gRPC, AWS, Grafana, and Honeycomb
- Operational excellence, including defining service health metrics, reliability goals, runbooks, on-call participation, and incident reviews
- Track record of shipping high-impact features with measurable improvements in downtime, manual effort, or throughput
- Willingness to work on-site five days per week when local, including in the office, manufacturing floor, or operations site
- Willingness to travel up to 15% annually
- Decisive ownership mindset and ability to balance development velocity with correctness in a safety-critical, hardware-integrated environment
Zipline Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Zipline and has not been reviewed or approved by Zipline.
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Healthcare Strength — Healthcare coverage is consistently described as comprehensive and high quality, with multiple plan choices, low out‑of‑pocket costs, and additions like HRA, One Medical, and fertility support.
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Parental & Family Support — Parental and family leave is highlighted as generous and meaningfully used, reinforcing support for major life events.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Paid time off, sick days, and holidays are portrayed as solid and broadly available, contributing to overall benefits depth.
Zipline Insights
What We Do
Zipline is the world's largest autonomous delivery network and is powered entirely by fixed-wing drones. Our fleet circles the equivalent distance of the equator every 2.5 days, and we have shipped hundreds of thousands of critical medical products across Rwanda, Ghana, and now beginning in the United States.
Why Work With Us
Zipline is the perfect intersection of super cutting-edge tech, deep social mission, and extremely compelling business case. Our small, scrappy, customer-obsessed, humble, and mission-driven team has set the bar for what is possible in the drone logistics industry globally, and has designed some incredibly elegant technology in the process.
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