Enterprise Systems Software Engineer Intern (Spring 2027)

As a Software Engineer Intern on the Enterprise Systems team at Zipline, you will take full ownership of the operational nervous system that powers manufacturing, supply chain, inventory traceability, and field deployment. You will work directly with hardware and operations partners to lead technical designs and deploy high-availability services where correctness is vital for safety and aircraft throughput. Your responsibilities include driving core product domains, delivering measurable impact, leading technical design, bridging hardware and software, owning production excellence, and engaging in embedded discovery on the shop floor.

Responsibilities

• Drive core product domains. You will be the primary architect and owner for critical systems driving Manufacturing Execution, Supply Chain, Finance, Parts Traceability, and Inventory, ensuring their long-term technical health and strategic direction.
• Deliver measurable impact. Within your first year, you will stabilize essential services to 99.9% uptime, slash manual planning and production interventions by over 50%, and deploy a comprehensive traceability pipeline that tracks the vast majority of our manufactured assets.
• Lead technical design. You’ll define the APIs, data models, and service boundaries that power our operations, while prioritizing observability through metrics, SLAs, and robust runbooks.
• Bridge hardware and software. You will build resilient integrations between our digital services and physical hardware tooling, driving direct handoffs and ensuring our systems remain deterministic even during intermittent network connectivity.
• Own production excellence. Engineers participate in an on-call rotation to maintain high-availability services, leading incident response and driving continuous improvement through deep-dive postmortems.
• Embedded discovery. You’ll work directly on the shop floor with manufacturing, supply chain, and flight ops teams to prototype workflows and drive the adoption of new operational tools.
• Elevate the team. You will mentor peers and refine our CI/CD and automated testing practices to ensure that deployments remain safe and repeatable in our unique hardware-integrated environment.

Requirements

• You must have completed the second year of your undergraduate studies in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field. Masters and PhD students are also eligible.
• Product-minded engineering. You excel at understanding user needs, identifying root causes, and designing pragmatic solutions that balance business value with technical simplicity.
• Systems perspective. You break down ambiguous operational problems, collaborate with stakeholders to define the right solution, and deliver software that improves real-world processes.
• Strong technical fundamentals. You design maintainable systems, model data thoughtfully, make sound technical tradeoffs, and use AI effectively to accelerate development while maintaining high quality.
• Modern technology stack. You'll work across Python, Go, PostgreSQL, React, Kafka, gRPC, AWS, Grafana, and Honeycomb, using AI throughout the development lifecycle for design, implementation, testing, debugging, and code review. We value engineers who learn new tools quickly over experience with any specific technology.
• Operational excellence. You define meaningful service health metrics and reliability goals, create operational runbooks, participate in on-call rotations, and drive improvements through incident reviews.
• Quantifiable results. You have a track record of shipping high-impact features that reduce manual intervention and boost throughput, backed by concrete metrics like downtime reduction or significant time savings.
• Collaboration and discovery. This role requires regular on-site presence at our engineering or operations hubs to partner with cross-functional teams. When local, expect 5 days per week in-office, on the manufacturing floor, or at a test/commercial operations site. You are open to traveling up to 15% annually to be in close proximity to users and stakeholders.
• Owner’s mindset. You are a decisive engineer who balances velocity with absolute correctness. You understand the direct operational consequences of your code in a safety-critical, hardware-integrated environment.

Benefits

• The hourly rate for this internship is $54 per hour. Additional benefits may include relocation support, a housing stipend, overtime pay, paid sick time, and other benefits, where applicable and subject to local requirements.