Embedded Software Engineer Intern (Fall 2026)

You've designed, built and/or deployed electromechanical systems or robots, inside or outside the classroom.

You’re comfortable working in one of C, C++, Python, or Rust, and have developed software for a real time operating system or embedded Linux.

You are comfortable receiving feedback so that you can learn to write code that is efficient, easy-to-read, well-tested, has friendly APIs, and incurs minimal technical debt.

You’re familiar with basic electrical engineering concepts, such as reading schematics, debugging with an oscilloscope, and communication protocols (CAN, SPI, UART, etc).

Do you love tinkering with mechanical and electrical devices and watching your code come to life?

Zipline is looking for interns to join our Embedded Systems team to advance our autonomous aircraft and ground systems.

From deploying embedded software to devices across the world, fault response and handling, launching & landing, all the way to integration with our customer’s physical & software systems, you will work with and learn from not only some of the most impressive embedded engineers in the field, but from a huge variety of our amazing Zipline team!

Embedded interns own a variety of big problems integral to our system!

Examples of previous projects included:

Building an RF radio test setup to validate antenna performance of the flight compute at the production end-of-line.

Zipline designs and operates the world’s largest drone delivery service providing access to critical medical supplies. Leading the way in drone delivery often means exceeding the capabilities of what’s available off the shelf, and as a result we need to engineer the majority of our system in-house. Doubling down on the reliability of our systems by writing embedded applications and drivers close to the hardware is a critical path to delivering to people whose lives will be meaningfully affected by smarter, more equitable access!

We trust our team, so we’ll trust you.  We’ll help you (and you’ll help us) find an area of technical ownership that you can dive deep into to define system requirements, develop creative and simple solutions, and prove with testing and data that your system meets the rigors and edge-cases of real-world deployment. We are a team that is constantly learning to improve our systems, and ourselves, and we can’t wait for you to join us!

Among our current challenges:

Design and develop a software platform for the new P2 Zip and the world’s cutest Droid delivery and dock system

Scale our flight and distribution center software to allow upwards exponentially more deliveries per day

Prototype, test, and refine next generation flight and ground systems working alongside our mechanical and electrical engineering teams