Lead Software Engineer, Developer Productivity

About Zipline

Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service. We design, build, and operate a large-scale autonomous logistics system delivering critical supplies, food, and retail products globally. We are seeking practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth.

About You and The Role

You are the Software Engineering Manager for Zipline’s Developer Productivity team. Your team builds 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 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.

What You'll Do

• Lead the team responsible for 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 the on-prem remote build execution platform and move more build and test workloads onto it.
• Improve the 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 tradeoffs between developer velocity, reliability, safety, and cost.

What You'll Bring

• A strong software engineering background and experience managing engineers working on developer platforms, infrastructure, build systems, or CI/CD.
• Deep knowledge of modern build and CI systems, including remote execution, caching, artifact management, and distributed infrastructure.
• Experience setting technical direction and delivering complex, cross-team projects with measurable results.
• Strong technical judgment and the ability to stay close to architecture, implementation, and operational issues.
• A developer-focused mindset and a track record of building tools that engineers rely on every day.
• Experience hiring, coaching, and growing engineers.
• Comfort working through ambiguity and creating structure around broad technical problems.
• Clear communication skills and the ability to work across software, firmware, infrastructure, and engineering leadership.

Bonus Points

• Experience with Bazel, Buildkite, BuildBarn, AWS, Linux, Docker, or large monorepos.
• Experience with C++, Rust, Python, Go, or TypeScript.
• Experience supporting robotics, embedded systems, hardware-in-the-loop testing, or safety-critical software.
• Experience leading major build-system, CI-platform, or repository migrations.

What Else You Need To Know

We value diversity at Zipline and welcome applications from those who are traditionally underrepresented in tech. If you like the sound of this position but are not sure if you are the perfect fit, please apply!