Sr. SWE Datacenter Automation
Required skills
- bare-metal provisioning
- PXE
- iPXE
- IPMI
- Redfish
- KVM/qemu
- ESXi
- Ceph
- NVMeoF
- SAN
Nice to have
- flight operations
- simulation
- edge compute
- firmware workflows
- dynamic inventory
- image generation
Role summary
Zipline is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for its Infrastructure team to own the automation and lifecycle management of their global datacenter compute and storage systems. This role involves bare-metal provisioning, hypervisor and storage cluster management, Kubernetes operations, and network configuration. The engineer will design and build automation to improve deployment velocity and reliability, set and meet SLIs/SLOs, lead incident response, and manage cost and capacity. The position requires hands-on work in datacenters, strong programming skills (Python, Go, or Rust), and experience with infrastructure-as-code tools and CI/CD. This role is based in South San Francisco with a hybrid work model and on-call responsibilities.
About Zipline
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. Today, Zipline operates on four continents, makes a delivery somewhere in the world every 30 seconds, and has completed millions of deliveries to date, including blood, vaccines, medical supplies, food, and retail products.
Our customers include the world’s largest and most prominent healthcare systems, governments, retailers, restaurants and global businesses who rely on us to save lives, reduce emissions, increase economic opportunity, and provide delivery from point A to point B as fast as possible. The drone is only 15% of what we’ve built to enable seamless, reliable, global operations.
Our system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and gives people time back. With more than 140 million commercial autonomous miles safely flown, Zipline is redefining access to healthcare, consumer products, and food across the globe.
We operate at a global scale and are looking for practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth. Our team is motivated by building systems that have a direct, meaningful impact on people’s lives and by scaling the future of logistics. We are seeking people who sculpt from first principles, enjoy facing adversity, and can do the impossible at record breaking speeds.
About You and The Role
You will be a Senior Software Engineer on Zipline’s Infrastructure team, owning the infrastructure that runs our global autonomous delivery platform. Zipline operates safety‑critical logistics at scale: we run private datacenters and edge compute to support flight operations, simulation, CI/CD, and production services that deliver millions of flights and time‑sensitive medical deliveries. This role sits at the intersection of hardware, virtualization, orchestration, and automation. Your work directly impacts deployment velocity, compute cost, and the reliability of systems supporting Zipline’s operations.
What You'll Do
What You'll Bring
What Else You Need To Know
This role is based in South San Francisco with an expectation of regular on‑site presence and participation in on‑call rotations and occasional travel to datacenter or field locations.
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!
Voluntary Self-Identification
For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.
As set forth in Zipline ’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.
