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.
We’re building the systems that power Zipline operations end-to-end, giving us the ability to design faster, smarter workflows, connect data across the business, and remove the friction that slows teams down. The Enterprise Systems team builds the software that connects manufacturing, supply chain, finance, inventory, hardware quality assurance, and field operations into a single operational nervous system. These systems directly shape how quickly and effectively Zipline can manufacture, test, deploy, and operate our global drone fleet.
Most companies adapt their operations to fit off-the-shelf enterprise software. At Zipline, we’re building our systems ourselves so the software can evolve with the business. Our philosophy is simple: business processes should inform system design, not the other way around. By owning these systems ourselves, we can rapidly iterate on workflows, automate complex operations, and continuously improve how the company operates as we scale.
Engineers on this team own the product and work directly with the end users who rely on these systems every day, from manufacturing and supply chain teams to field operators running our delivery network. This proximity to real operations allows engineers to identify problems first-hand, design and build solutions end-to-end, and deliver systems that have immediate impact across the company.
Why This Role Is UniqueEnterprise Systems at Zipline sits at the intersection of software and real-world operations. The systems this team builds determine how efficiently we manufacture aircraft, move inventory, maintain traceability, deploy assets, and support a growing global delivery network.
- Build ERP from scratch. You’ll design and build the core systems that power Zipline, instead of configuring third-party systems.
- Extreme ownership. Engineers own problems end-to-end: identifying operational pain points, designing solutions, building systems, deploying them to production, and driving adoption across the business.
- Embedded with real operations. Engineers work directly with manufacturing, supply chain, finance, and field operations teams to understand workflows firsthand and build systems that solve real problems.
- AI-accelerated engineering. We lean heavily into AI and agentic workflows, taking advantage of the latest capabilities to accelerate development. Engineers effectively leverage and orchestrate AI tooling to increase velocity, quality, and throughput while maintaining strong engineering rigor.
Most software roles focus on building isolated features or optimizing digital experiences — this role is different. You’ll build the operational nervous system of the company, owning core business problem spaces that enable Zipline to manufacture, source, scale, and operate its global drone fleet. 95% of the company will use the tools that you build.
You will solve problems like:
- How do we scale our manufacturing systems and tooling to increase production rates by orders of magnitude without scaling labor costs exponentially?
- How do we plan, execute, and automate manufacturing and supply chain systems to support aggressive fleet growth and increasing operational complexity?
- How do we build a trusted, end-to-end traceability system that captures the full lifecycle of every part — from design to production to operation?
- How do we create a true single source of truth across systems so data is consistent, reliable, and never fragmented?
- How do we design platforms that scale with the business without becoming bottlenecks for critical operational workflows?
We care far more about how you approach problems than about experience with any specific technology. Strong candidates for this role typically have:
- Experience building and shipping production software systems
- Strong full-stack engineering fundamentals
- Ability to design scalable systems and services
- Comfort working directly with stakeholders to understand problems and define solutions
- Ownership mindset and the ability to drive projects end-to-end
- Interest in improving operational workflows and building systems that power real-world operations
Our current stack includes technologies such as Python, Go, React, gRPC, Kafka, PostgreSQL, AWS, Bazel, Grafana, and Honeycomb, but we value engineers who can learn new tools quickly and focus on solving the right problems.
We also lean heavily into AI-assisted and agentic engineering workflows, and we’re excited to work with engineers who are interested in using modern AI tooling to amplify their productivity while maintaining high standards for system design and code quality.
What Else You Need to KnowZipline South San Francisco, California, USA Office
South San Francisco, CA, United States
Similar Jobs
What you need to know about the San Francisco Tech Scene
Key Facts About San Francisco Tech
- Number of Tech Workers: 365,500; 13.9% of overall workforce (2024 CompTIA survey)
- Major Tech Employers: Google, Apple, Salesforce, Meta
- Key Industries: Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, fintech, consumer technology, software
- Funding Landscape: $50.5 billion in venture capital funding in 2024 (Pitchbook)
- Notable Investors: Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins
- Research Centers and Universities: Stanford University; University of California, Berkeley; University of San Francisco; Santa Clara University; Ames Research Center; Center for AI Safety; California Institute for Regenerative Medicine
