Autonomy Droid Perception SWE - Onboard Systems

About Zipline

Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service. We are on a mission to serve all humans equally by ensuring access to food, medicine and essential goods anytime, anywhere. We design, build, and operate the world’s largest autonomous logistics system, delivering critical supplies quickly and reliably. Today, Zipline operates on four continents, makes a delivery somewhere in the world every 30 seconds, and has completed millions of deliveries to date, including blood, vaccines, medical supplies, food, and retail products.

Our customers include the world’s largest and most prominent healthcare systems, governments, retailers, restaurants and global businesses who rely on us to save lives, reduce emissions, increase economic opportunity, and provide delivery from point A to point B as fast as possible. The drone is only 15% of what we’ve built to enable seamless, reliable, global operations.

Our system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and gives people time back. With more than 140 million commercial autonomous miles safely flown, Zipline is redefining access to healthcare, consumer products, and food across the globe.

We operate at a global scale and are looking for practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth. Our team is motivated by building systems that have a direct, meaningful impact on people’s lives and by scaling the future of logistics. We are seeking people who sculpt from first principles, enjoy facing adversity, and can do the impossible at record breaking speeds.

About You and The Role

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.

We're hiring 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. You will work closely with the planner team to make sure we build the right system, rather than just the best perception model.

This is not a research role—you’ll be expected to move fast, ship production-grade systems, and find clever ways to apply state-of-the-art techniques to tangible, high-impact problems.

What You'll Do

• 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

• Zipline moves fast. 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. At the