Embedded Software Engineer
South San Francisco, CA

Job Description

Zipline operates the world's only drone delivery system at national scale to send urgent medicines like lifesaving blood and vaccines to those in need, no matter where they live. We're at the forefront of a revolution, designing, manufacturing, and operating our own fleet of drones to provide instant access to those who were previously underserved.

Zipline is looking for an embedded software engineer to own large projects running on our embedded avionics. You'll be responsible for designing efficient, robust systems and seeing them through implementation, test, and release. You should be excited about challenging the limits of what has been done before, and motivated to raise the bar for the reliability and safety of drones.

Strong candidates will have many of these skills:

* Deep knowledge of embedded programming
* Experience designing highly reliable systems
* Understand the specifics and tradeoffs of data buses including CAN and RS485
* Ability to write code that can be instrumented, debugged, and unit-tested
* Root-causing obscure and deep-rooted issues discovered in the field
* Experience working on critical systems, such as medical devices, automotive platforms, aerospace systems, or safety-critical applications

Example projects include:

* Charting a communication pipeline for streaming GPS correction data from a ground base station to the vehicle over two data paths: cellular and line-of-sight radio
* Identify design flaws and weaknesses in our current avionics design and contribute to the design of our next-gen autopilot in order to gain true single-fault tolerance on all systems
* Design and implement a scheme to detect a misbehaving PPS (pulse-per-second) from our primary GPS and have all distributed nodes in the system failover to the backup PPS
* Building a flight logging driver for high throughput, high reliability, and tolerant to sudden power loss
* Building robust drivers for off-the-shelf sensors (GPS, IMU, air data sensors) that detect and report failures
* Design and implement a Wi-Fi-based boot-loading system for a multiprocessor distributed architecture

Our mission is to provide every human on Earth with instant access to vital medical supplies. To achieve this, we are building an awesome team of smart, dedicated engineers who come from all sorts of backgrounds. If you are unsure if you meet all the requirements listed above but still think you provide value not explicitly listed, we'd love for you to apply!

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!