About the job
About You and the Role
Zipline is pioneering the world’s largest autonomous logistics network, responsible for delivering critical medical and commercial supplies worldwide. As we expand our operations into increasingly complex and safety-sensitive environments, validating and demonstrating our autonomy performance at scale becomes paramount.
We are in search of a highly skilled software engineer to join our Autonomy Validation team—a vital group dedicated to developing the infrastructure, tools, and frameworks necessary for software validation across the entire Autonomy division. This encompasses planning, perception, control, and the decision-making logic that drives our self-flying aircraft.
Our autonomy stack is uniquely custom-built. While this provides us with unparalleled control and performance, it also necessitates the creation of tailored validation tools, as standard testing solutions are insufficient. In this position, you will be responsible for developing robust internal platforms for validation, enabling extensive simulations and rigorous scenario testing, thus ensuring that autonomy engineers can operate with confidence.
This role is not focused on quality assurance; instead, it represents a foundational software engineering position that will significantly influence our approach to testing, verifying, and safely deploying autonomy on a global scale.
What You'll Do
- Develop and maintain the infrastructure for validating autonomous features and system performance across planning, perception, and control.
- Design and create simulation tools and scenario generation for extensive, high-fidelity testing of autonomy in both real-world and edge-case scenarios.
- Build custom tools for the validation and testing of autonomy components that integrate seamlessly into our internal development stack.
- Create scalable, dependable, and automated solutions for executing, tracking, and analyzing thousands of validation tasks within the autonomy organization.
- Engage collaboratively with:
- Autonomy engineers, to assess how system behaviors should be evaluated.
- Systems and data engineers, to ensure metrics, safety thresholds, and requirements are codified in our testing infrastructure.
- Flight test and QA teams, to connect real-world results back into testing tools and continuous integration loops.
- Establish best practices for software release validation, ensuring our autonomy stack is safe, measurable, and production-ready.
- Contribute to internal documentation, standards, and validation workflows that can scale across the autonomy organization.