Zipline is seeking a Staff Motion Planning Software Engineer to join the Autonomy Motion Planning team. The role involves developing real-time trajectory generation and decision-making for autonomous drone flight, optimizing for safety, energy, time, and reliability. You will design safety-critical software, extend the autonomy stack for new aircraft, and validate systems through simulation and real fleet data. This position is critical to scaling Zipline's autonomous logistics system in dense U.S. metros.

Responsibilities

Build real-time trajectory generation and decision-making for autonomous flight (search-based, sampling, MPC, convex/non-convex optimization).
Tackle joint optimization across safety, energy, time, and reliability—balancing mission goals with vehicle constraints.
Plan in uncertain environments with complex dynamics: robustness to wind/turbulence, degraded sensors, and partial observability.
Design safety-critical software for avoiding obstacles and interfacing with humans while delivering and picking up packages
Extend the autonomy stack for new aircraft and payloads; define clean interfaces with perception and controls.
Prove it before flight: large-scale sim, SIL/HIL, log replay, and fault-injection.
Mine real fleet data to validate safety metrics, improve models, and burn down long-tail failure modes.

Requirements

Master's degree in Computer Science or related field and 7+ years of experience building software for safety-critical systems (aerospace/AV/robotics).
Strong in Rust/C++/C for real-time, fault-tolerant code on embedded/Linux.
Depth in planning & search (e.g. A*/ anytime / RRT*/sampling), trajectory optimization/MPC—shipped on real robots/vehicles.
Hands-on with simulation at scale, SIL/HIL, log replay, and metrics-driven validation.
Evidence of shipping production-grade autonomy through ambiguous, noisy conditions—owning the last mile to reliability.
Systems thinker who collaborates tightly with perception, controls, and flight ops; crisp docs and design reviews.

Benefits

The starting cash range for this role is $230,000 - $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; discretionary annual or performance bonuses; sales incentives; benefits such as medical, dental and vision insurance; paid time off; and more.