Lead Software Engineer, Developer Productivity

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.

You are the Software Engineering Manager for Zipline’s Developer Productivity team. Your team builds the tools and infrastructure that help engineers develop, test, and ship software across FlightSystems and cloud.

You will own the team’s roadmap, technical direction, and execution. Your work will improve the speed and reliability of CI, expand our use of remote build execution, simplify developer workflows, and support the long-term evolution of Zipline’s software platform.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You will grow and coach the team, stay close to technical decisions, and work directly with software, firmware, autonomy, and infrastructure teams to solve the problems slowing engineers down.

• Lead the team responsible for Zipline’s build systems, CI/CD infrastructure, remote execution, and developer tooling

• Own the roadmap for improving CI speed, reliability, and developer experience across FlightSystems and cloud

• Expand our on-prem remote build execution platform and move more build and test workloads onto it

• Improve our Bazel build graph, remove bottlenecks, and make builds more hermetic and compatible with remote execution

• Simplify CI by moving build logic into Bazel and consolidating heavy workloads into common Buildkite pipelines

• Lead large migrations, including bringing firmware and other development workflows into the shared build and CI platform

• Define reliability goals, observability, capacity plans, and incident-response practices for critical developer infrastructure

• Hire, coach, and develop engineers while building a team culture centered on ownership, practical problem-solving, and strong internal customer support

• Partner with engineering leaders to set priorities and make clear tradeoffs between developer velocity, reliability, safety, and cost

• A strong software