Staff Software Engineer, Healthcare

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 B as fast as possible.

About the role

Zipline’s Nest Applications Software team builds the fulfillment, maintenance, and flight systems behind automated delivery operations in Africa. These systems manage medical inventory, order processing, flight coordination, supply-chain and financial workflows, and customer ordering and tracking. You will own critical decisions across these connected workflows, helping operators and customers see accurate information, move orders through fulfillment, and coordinate reliable deliveries. Your work will connect field operations, internal business teams, and customer-facing applications as the network grows.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end software for fulfillment, maintenance, and flight workflows that support Zipline operations in Africa.
• Partner with operations, supply chain, finance, and customer-facing teams to simplify workflows and resolve high-impact user problems.
• Lead backend and frontend delivery for major projects, from architecture and data models through implementation and production rollout.
• Design modular distributed and event-driven systems that can adapt as operational and business needs change.
• Build automated unit, integration, and system testing that protects critical inventory, order, and flight-coordination workflows.
• Improve production reliability, observability, and robustness so teams can identify issues and make sound operational decisions.
• Raise engineering effectiveness through code review, design standards, mentoring, and AI-assisted development, testing, and operational workflows.

Requirements

• 10+ years building and operating production-grade distributed systems.
• Deep full-stack development experience with Python, Go, or a similar object-oriented language, plus React or a comparable JavaScript framework.
• Experience architecting distributed, event-driven systems using Kafka or similar technologies.
• Strong database modeling and performance-tuning experience with Postgres.
• A track record of designing software that is simple, flexible, resilient, and supported by comprehensive automated testing.
• Experience making architectural decisions in a fast-changing operational environment and mentoring junior engineers through coaching, pairing, or design reviews.
• Ability to travel 3-4 times a year to visit our operations in Africa; desire to travel more extensively or to relocate near our operations is a plus.
• Experience with fulfillment, logistics, or warehouse systems is valued.

Pay

The starting cash range for this role is $180,000 - $270,000. The final cash pay will depend on a candidate’s experience, qualifications, skills, working location, and projected impact. The total compensation package may also include equity compensation, overtime pay, discretionary annual or performance bonuses, sales incentives, and benefits such as medical, dental, and vision insurance, and paid time off.