Simulation Software Engineer
Posted Updated
- Zipline is scaling the world’s largest autonomous drone delivery network—a pioneering Physical AI system—delivering life-saving medical supplies and commercial goods globally. Our commitment to safety and exponential scale demands an industrial-grade virtual test environment, decoupled from physical hardware. That’s the mission of our Simulation team
- We are seeking a Simulation Software Engineer to build and evolve the core infrastructure that validates our entire robotics fleet software
- This is not a standard simulation role; it is deep, systems-level software engineering focused on creating high-performance, high-fidelity digital twins that enable deterministic, faster-than-realtime testing of all autonomous safety-critical flight logic, cloud connectivity, and vehicle coordination across thousands of mission scenarios
- This role is absolutely critical for the safety and reliability of Zipline’s real-world Physical AI deployment. If you are driven by the challenge of integrating complex flight software with synthetic environments, real hardware, and advanced time-manipulation to rigorously test an autonomous system, we want to hear from you!
- This is not a niche role within Autonomy—it’s a company-wide enabler
- If your passion lies in building infrastructure that unlocks fast, safe iteration across multiple engineering domains, this role is built for you
- Build the simulation platform: Develop the reusable infrastructure that powers simulation across the company, including execution, scheduling, orchestration, APIs, and developer tooling
- Integrate with production software: Build interfaces that allow flight software, cloud services, embedded software, and hardware to execute inside deterministic virtual environments
- Scale simulation: Scale from single-vehicle debugging to fleet-scale testing across thousands of scenarios in CI
- Partner with engineers: Support teams building new tests, debugging failures, improving workflows, and expanding simulation capabilities
- Why This Role is Cross-Cutting:
- The Flight Software team uses simulation to validate onboard mission logic
- The Test team uses it to explore pre-flight conditions and troubleshoot real-world anomalies
- The Cloud team uses it to model server interactions like map updates, delivery instructions, and real-time comms
- Full system Hardware-In-The-Loop testing framework uses simulation for flight software validation
- The Embedded and Ground teams use it to validate system integration, safety cases, and operational resilience
- And the CI/CD pipeline relies on simulation to catch regressions before they ever reach a flight zone
- Expertise in concepts like time synchronization, inter-process communication, and determinism within a systems-level or real-time context
- Demonstrated ability to reason about large software systems, APIs, concurrency, debugging, and software architecture
- A passion for building enabling infrastructure and tools that allow Zipline engineers to simulate faster, test earlier, and deploy safer
- 4+ years of professional software engineering experience in C++ or Rust (Rust experience is a strong plus)
- Deep experience architecting, building, or maintaining complex robotics, aerospace, or distributed systems simulations/digital twins
- Familiarity with physical modeling, kinematics, dynamics, or robotics simulation concepts
- Bonus: Experience scaling simulation in CI, HIL (Hardware-in-the-Loop), or formal verification methods