This Senior Embedded Software Engineer role on the Embedded Platform team at Zipline involves owning the design, implementation, and lifecycle of embedded middleware services for autonomous aircraft. You will define and evolve interfaces for IPC, OTA updates, logging, and observability, delivering production Rust and C++ code. The role includes setting technical direction for cross-service platform architecture and partnering with flight-software, hardware, and integration teams to ensure reliable operation on embedded Linux systems.

Responsibilities

Own the design, implementation, validation, and lifecycle of embedded middleware services for autonomous aircraft.
Define and evolve IPC, communications-bridge, OTA-update, logging, observability, and service-lifecycle interfaces used across flight software.
Deliver production Rust and C++ with testing, diagnostics, and maintainability built into each platform capability.
Set technical direction for cross-service platform architecture, including interface decisions and tradeoffs that affect multiple flight-software teams.
Partner with flight-software, hardware, and integration teams to ensure platform services operate reliably on embedded Linux aircraft systems.
Investigate failures across software, operating-system, network, and hardware boundaries; drive corrective changes that improve reliability, performance, and operational visibility.
Establish design-review and engineering practices that make services safer to deploy, easier to diagnose, and practical for downstream teams to adopt.

Requirements

5–12 years developing embedded, systems, or platform software in production environments.
Strong Rust, C++, or comparable systems-programming skills, with experience delivering reliable software on embedded Linux.
Working knowledge of concurrency, synchronization, networking, IPC, and distributed or multi-process systems.
Ability to debug complex behavior across services, operating systems, networks, and hardware.
Experience designing technical interfaces and carrying cross-functional integrations through delivery.
For Staff-level scope, a record of leading architecture across multiple systems and influencing decisions beyond an individual component.
Experience in aerospace, robotics, automotive, industrial, medical, or another high-reliability domain; autonomy, OTA, telemetry, Linux internals, or resource-constrained optimization are relevant.