[Hiring] Staff Software Engineer @Zipline

Role Description

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Nest Applications team, you will lead the evolution of the systems behind reliable healthcare delivery operations. You will own major technical decisions across interconnected operational workflows and help build software that remains simple, resilient, and adaptable as the network grows.

This is a hands-on, product-oriented full-stack role with deep backend ownership. We are looking for an engineer who brings exceptional Go expertise and can raise the technical bar across APIs, integrations, distributed systems, and engineering practices.

What You'll Do

• Own end-to-end software for fulfillment, maintenance, inventory, and flight workflows.
• Lead architecture across multiple teams, from data models and API contracts through implementation, rollout, and ongoing operation.
• Design robust APIs, backend services, and integration patterns that connect field operations, internal teams, and customer-facing products.
• Build modular, event-driven systems that can evolve with operational and business needs.
• Improve reliability, observability, automated testing, and operational decision-making for critical workflows.
• Establish strong engineering standards through design reviews, code review, mentoring, and technical leadership.
• Partner directly with operations, supply chain, finance, and customer-facing teams to resolve high-impact problems.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of production software engineering experience, including staff-level technical scope.
• Experience in both a high-engineering-bar organization where you worked at scale AND a startup or scale-up environment where you built from the ground up, with limited devops support and handled fast pace and ambiguity.
• Deep production expertise in Go; you should be able to set technical direction for our backend services and develop other engineers’ Go capability.
• Experience designing and operating distributed, event-driven systems; Kafka or comparable technologies are strongly relevant.
• Strong database design and performance experience, including Postgres.
• A record of owning architecture across teams, leading significant migrations, mentoring engineers, and working directly with customers or external stakeholders.
• Clear, effective communication in English.
• Ability to work from the US East Coast or London, UK, and travel to Africa approximately three times per year.

Additional Valuable Experience

• Integrating with external partner APIs or partner systems.
• Designing reliable integrations points and API contracts, authentication, error handling, observability, and integration workflows.
• Healthcare, fulfillment, logistics, warehouse-management, or e-commerce systems.

Requirements

• For US-based candidates, the starting cash range for this role is $180,000 - $220,000.
• 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.

Company Description

Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service. We are on a mission to serve all humans equally by ensuring access to food, medicine and essential goods anytime, anywhere. We design, build, and operate the world’s largest autonomous logistics system, delivering critical supplies quickly and reliably.