Senior Software Engineer, Autonomy Simulation & Validation

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.

- 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

- 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

- Strong software engineering skills with proficiency in C++, Rust, or C (Python is a plus for tooling and scripting)

- Hands-on experience building or working with simulation systems for robotics or autonomous systems , particularly for testing or validation

- 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)

- Roles focused mainly on systems engineering without hands-on software development

- Infrastructure- or DevOps-focused roles without experience in autonomy or simulation

- QA/QC-focused verification roles without significant software engineering ownership

The starting cash range for this role is $180,000 - $220,000. Please note that this is a target, starting cash range for a candidate who meets the minimum qualifications for this role. The final cash pay for this role will depend on a variety of factors, including a specific candidate's experience, qualifications, skills, working location, and projected impact.

The total compensation package for this role may also include: equity compensation; overtime pay; discretionary annual or performance bonuses; sales incentives; benefits such as medical, dental and vision insurance; paid time off; and more.