Staff Software Engineer, Healthcare

We are seeking people who sculpt from first principles, enjoy facing adversity, and can do the impossible at record breaking speeds.

Zipline's Nest Applications Software team builds the fulfillment, maintenance, and flight systems behind automated delivery operations in Africa. These systems manage medical inventory, order processing, flight coordination, supply-chain and financial workflows, and customer ordering and tracking.

You will own critical decisions across these connected workflows, helping operators and customers see accurate information, move orders through fulfillment, and coordinate reliable deliveries. Your work will connect field operations, internal business teams, and customer-facing applications as the network grows.

- Own end-to-end software for fulfillment, maintenance, and flight workflows that support Zipline operations in Africa.

- Partner with operations, supply chain, finance, and customer-facing teams to simplify workflows and resolve high-impact user problems.

- Lead backend and frontend delivery for major projects, from architecture and data models through implementation and production rollout.

- Design modular distributed and event-driven systems that can adapt as operational and business needs change.

- Build automated unit, integration, and system testing that protects critical inventory, order, and flight-coordination workflows.

- Improve production reliability, observability, and robustness so teams can identify issues and make sound operational decisions.

- Raise engineering effectiveness through code review, design standards, mentoring, and AI-assisted development, testing, and operational workflows.

- 10+ years building and operating production-grade distributed systems.

- Deep full-stack development experience with Python, Go, or a similar object-oriented language, plus React or a comparable JavaScript framework.

- Experience architecting distributed, event-driven systems using Kafka or similar technologies.

- Strong database modeling and performance-tuning experience with Postgres.

- A track record of designing software that is simple, flexible, resilient, and supported by comprehensive automated testing.

- Experience making architectural decisions in a fast-changing operational environment and mentoring junior engineers through coaching, pairing, or design reviews.

- Ability to travel 3-4 times a year to visit our operations in Africa; desire to travel more extensively or to relocate near our operations is a plus.

- Experience with fulfillment, logistics, or warehouse systems is valued.

The starting cash range for this role is $180,000 - $270,000. 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.

Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws or our own sensibilities.

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!