Staff Motion Planning Software Engineer

Job overview

The Staff Motion Planning Software Engineer role is onsite in South San Francisco, CA, and pays $230,000–$270,000 annually as a starting cash range. The role supports Zipline’s Autonomy Motion Planning team. Zipline operates an autonomous drone delivery system for food, medicine, and other essential goods. The engineer develops real-time decision-making and trajectory-planning software for autonomous flight, balancing safety, energy, time, and reliability while extending the autonomy stack and validating performance through simulation and fleet data.

What you'll do

• Build real-time trajectory generation and decision-making for autonomous flight
• optimize safety, energy, time, and reliability
• plan in uncertain environments
• develop safety-critical obstacle-avoidance software
• extend autonomy systems for aircraft and payloads
• validate through simulation, SIL/HIL, log replay, and fault injection
• analyze fleet data to improve safety metrics and address failure modes.

What we're looking for

Skills & competencies

staff software engineer

motion planning

south san francisco ca

zipline

autonomous flight

drone delivery

trajectory planning

decision-making

safety-critical software

rust

c++

$230k–$270k annually

simulation and hil

Work arrangement

• Weekend coverage required

Benefits & perks

• The total compensation package may include equity, discretionary annual or performance bonuses, sales incentives, medical, dental, and vision insurance, and paid time off.

Why this role

Staff-level autonomy role shaping motion-planning approaches and future architectures for a large-scale drone delivery system.

About the employer

Zipline is hiring for this role. Industry: Custom Computer Programming Services. Sector: 54.