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, manufactures, and operates autonomous delivery systems that move essential goods where they are needed. As a Senior Data Engineer on the Data Platform team, you will build cloud data foundations that turn application and operational telemetry into trusted inputs for delivery-system decisions, product analytics, and ML.
You will own the data backbone across ingestion, orchestration, lakehouse and warehouse systems, and shared engineering standards. Success means making operational telemetry and downstream datasets dependable, discoverable, performant, and cost-conscious for the teams building and operating Zipline’s delivery system.
What You'll Do- Design and operate cloud services for data ingestion, transformation, validation, and serving across batch and near-real-time pipelines.
- Build orchestration patterns and shared libraries, templates, CI checks, and golden paths that standardize dataset publishing and transformations.
- Own lakehouse and warehouse foundations, including table management, schema evolution, partitioning, workload isolation, access patterns, and lifecycle management.
- Establish data contracts, metadata, naming, versioning, lineage, freshness, quality checks, and service objectives tied to operational and business impact.
- Diagnose distributed-system bottlenecks and improve throughput, query performance, concurrency, storage efficiency, and infrastructure or warehouse cost.
- Partner with service, telemetry, embedded, analytics, data science, and ML teams; lead technical reviews and align teams on durable platform interfaces and tradeoffs.
- 5+ years of professional software or data engineering experience, including production systems built primarily with Python or Rust.
- Strong distributed-systems and data-systems foundations, with hands-on experience building and operating pipelines and data infrastructure at scale.
- Experience with cloud infrastructure and production operations, ideally AWS and Kubernetes, plus workflow orchestration tools such as Prefect or Airflow.
- Experience with modern data warehouses, preferably Snowflake, and lakehouse table formats, data modeling, and transformation workflows such as dbt.
- Demonstrated judgment on cost, performance, and reliability, including production guardrails, backfills, idempotency, retries, safe deployments, and data-outage runbooks.
- Clear technical communication and influence. Experience with high-volume telemetry or sensor data, data observability, infrastructure-as-code, or safety-critical systems is strongly preferred.
- This is a full-time role based in South San Francisco.
The starting cash range for this role is $160.000-$200.000. 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!
Skills Required
- 5+ years of professional software or data engineering experience
- Production systems built primarily with Python or Rust
- Strong distributed-systems and data-systems foundations; hands-on experience building and operating pipelines and data infrastructure at scale
- Experience with cloud infrastructure and production operations
- Experience with AWS
- Experience with Kubernetes
- Experience with workflow orchestration tools such as Prefect or Airflow
- Experience with modern data warehouses and lakehouse table formats, data modeling, and transformation workflows
- Experience with Snowflake
- Experience with dbt
- Judgment on cost, performance, and reliability; production guardrails, backfills, idempotency, retries, safe deployments, and data-outage runbooks
- Clear technical communication and ability to influence cross-functional teams
- Experience with high-volume telemetry/sensor data, data observability, infrastructure-as-code, or safety-critical systems
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.
-
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.
-
Parental & Family Support — Parental and family leave is highlighted as generous and meaningfully used, reinforcing support for major life events.
-
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.
Gallery
_0.png)
.png)
