Senior Software Engineer (Autonomy Simulation & Validation)
Posted Updated
- Zipline is building the world’s largest autonomous logistics system, delivering vital medical and commercial supplies across the globe. As we scale our operations and extend into more complex, safety-critical environments, the ability to validate and prove our autonomy performance at scale becomes absolutely essential
- We’re looking for a deeply technical software engineer to join the Autonomy Validation team — a core team responsible for building the infrastructure, tools, and frameworks that support software validation across the entire Autonomy organization. This includes planning, perception, control, and all of the decision-making logic that powers our self-flying aircraft
- Our autonomy stack is highly custom-built, and while that gives us unmatched control and performance, it also means standard out-of-the-box testing tools don’t work. In this role, you’ll take ownership of developing robust internal platforms for validation — enabling both simulation at scale and rigorous scenario testing — so that autonomy engineers can ship with confidence
- This is not a QA role. It’s a foundational software engineering position building critical systems that will directly shape how we test, verify, and deploy autonomy safely around the world
- Build and own the infrastructure for validating autonomous features and system performance across planning, perception, and control
- Design and develop simulation tools and scenario generation for large-scale and high-fidelity testing of autonomy under real-world and edge-case conditions
- Develop custom tools for validation and testing of autonomy components that plug into our internal autonomy development stack
- Create scalable, reliable, and automated solutions for running, tracking, and analyzing thousands of validation tasks across autonomy org
- Collaborate deeply with:
- Autonomy engineers, to understand how system behavior should be evaluated
- Systems and data engineers, to ensure metrics, safety thresholds, and requirements are codified in test infrastructure
- Flight test and QA teams, to connect real-world results back into test tools and CI loops
- Establish best practices for software release validation, helping ensure our autonomy stack is safe, measurable, and production-ready
- Contribute to internal docs, standards, and validation workflows that scale across the autonomy organization
- Define validation methodologies and metrics, determining how new autonomy features should be evaluated and measured in simulation
- Hands-on experience building or working with simulation systems for robotics or autonomous systems, particularly for testing or validation
- Strong software engineering skills with proficiency in C++, Rust, or C (Python is a plus for tooling and scripting)
- 5+ years of experience building software systems for simulation, testing, or safety validation — ideally in robotics, autonomy, aerospace, or other real-time, safety-critical domains
- Experience building tools, platforms, or infrastructure used by other engineers
- Understanding of validation methodologies, including defining metrics, evaluating system behavior, and testing complex electromechanical systems
- Experience with high-fidelity simulation or scenario generation frameworks
- Experience with large-scale or distributed systems (e.g., cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, AWS)
- Familiarity working with systems engineering concepts (requirements, safety constraints, metrics)
- Exposure to autonomy stacks (planning, perception, control)
- Some exposure to machine learning systems (not required)