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.
Zipline builds and operates autonomous delivery systems that enable fast, reliable, and sustainable delivery for businesses and consumers, transforming how goods move in everyday commerce. To power this, the Maps Team is building out the long term scalable solutions that enable us to fly in new countries and regions as rapidly as possible. This team is responsible for building tools and services that produce artifacts used by our vehicles to fly their missions in the real world. This means the outputs from the Maps Team define the places our vehicles will fly in the world, their constraints, and provide strong priors for the real-time system on the vehicle to follow to accomplish its mission safely.
The RoleIn this role you will contribute to, build, and own portions of Zipline’s Maps stack. That includes contributing to an extensible path planning service used for generating routes that are operationally flown every day. It also includes a suite of services for data generation, transformation and access for path planning and flight data analytics. Your work within the team could range from path planning algorithms, validation of artifacts for compliance with flight requirements, to spatial data generation and data transformation pipelines. Your work will help us achieve multi-objective routing and efficient spatial data ingestion and access, enabling Zipline to serve more customers around the world. From this internship, you can expect to learn about how theoretical path planning algorithms are adapted for a real world problem, and how data and spatial search interact to enable routing in air. Our ideal candidate works well in startup environments, is comfortable wearing many hats, and is excited to learn about many aspects of how Zipline’s spatial planning works today.
What You'll Do- Work on services that generate routes and spatial planning artifacts
- Use tools to visualize and evaluate geospatial features that impact serviceability
- Work with teams to make spatial data accessible instantaneously anywhere in the world
- Improve planning algorithms to make routing fast, safe, and reliable
- Prototyping a new path planning algorithm to enhance long-range routes
- Incorporating a multidimensional risk data into the routing engine
- Creating tooling for generating composite Digital Elevation Models
- Building infrastructure to enable our zips to survey large areas
- Must have at least completed the second year of your Undergraduate studies. Masters and PhD students are also eligible
- Strong analytical and technical problem solving skills
- Deep understanding of algorithmic optimization
- Proficient coding and programming skills
- Understanding of automated testing practices
- Preferred experience supporting or developing novel algorithmic research
- Preferred experience with spatial data
This internship is a full-time position, in-person at our South San Francisco office. We will host our Fall 2026 interns from September to December.
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 at least second year of undergraduate studies (Masters and PhD students eligible)
- Strong analytical and technical problem solving skills
- Deep understanding of algorithmic optimization
- Proficient coding and programming skills
- Understanding of automated testing practices
- Experience supporting or developing novel algorithmic research
- Experience with spatial data
- Ability to work full-time in-person at South San Francisco during Fall 2026 (September–December)
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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