Software Engineer - Maps Routing

You are a senior software engineer on Routing: the team that computes safe, efficient, operational flight paths for every Zipline aircraft.

Routing is a safety-critical, real-time service that turns operational priorities, vehicle performance, weather, airspace restrictions, and demand into the concrete routes flown by autonomous vehicles.

Your work will directly affect delivery latency, fleet throughput, and operational safety across missions in live flight operations.

You will operate at the intersection of optimization, autonomy, and distributed systems, shipping code that runs in production, responds to incidents, and iterates rapidly in partnership with flight operations, autonomy, and safety engineering.

Title/level: Senior Software Engineer (routing/algorithms) — owner of production routing systems.

Travel to flight sites as needed for launches or operational troubleshooting (up to ~10% travel typical).

Own end-to-end design, implementation, and operation of core routing services that generate and schedule flight plans for the fleet.

Translate operational objectives (throughput targets, service-level priorities, safety constraints) into quantifiable optimization objectives and constraints; deliver routing outputs that meet those targets in production.

Implement and maintain algorithms for graph search, path planning, dynamic re-routing, and batching that run under strict latency and availability SLAs.

Build telemetry, test harnesses, and offline simulation pipelines to measure routing quality (e.g., average delivery latency, route success rate, reroute frequency, compute latency) and iterate based on quantified regressions.

Define and own production SLAs and SLOs for routing services (latency, availability, correctness) and drive improvements until targets are met.

Lead incident response for routing-related production outages: triage, mitigation, postmortem, and follow-up fixes; participate in on-call rotation as required to meet operational reliability targets.