Autonomy Droid Perception SWE - Onboard Systems

Zipline is operating the world’s largest autonomous logistics network—delivering critical medical and commercial goods globally with high reliability, precision, and scale.

As we expand into increasingly complex, safety-critical environments, the ML systems behind our autonomy stack must be robust, adaptable, and deeply integrated with the hardware.

senior and staff perception engineers

to join our Droid team, the group responsible for the autonomy that powers Zipline’s backyard delivery experience.

You’ll build realtime 3D perception ML models that transform multiple camera inputs into scene geometry and semantics that help our mission planner with delivery and package pickup.

You’ll develop across the entire perception stack, from optimizing the onboard TensorRT engines to building a data flywheel that finds interesting samples from our long-tail of customer deliveries.

Implement, train and evaluate real-time 3D perception models that work with two or more cameras across one or more timesteps

Deploy and run these models onboard a resource-constrained computer, finding ways to optimize and reduce compute and memory footprints

Build visualization, introspection and eval tooling to deeply understand model performance both on test datasets as well as “in the wild”

Work closely with the motion planning team, building an expressive yet compact interface between the two subsystems and tracking the right metrics to ensure we’re always hill-climbing towards a better overall system

On average, every 6 weeks, you will ship a new feature (or sometimes even a new model!) to production.

At the Senior level, you'll lead architectural decisions, drive experimentation, and own outcomes for a particular model head or backbone.