Autonomy Droid Perception SWE - Offboard Systems

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.

Our customers include healthcare systems, governments, retailers, restaurants and global businesses who rely on us to save lives, reduce emissions, increase economic opportunity, and provide fast delivery services.

We operate at a global scale and are looking for practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth.

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.

We're hiring senior and staff perception engineers to join our Droid team, responsible for the autonomy that powers Zipline's backyard delivery experience. This team owns onboard, offboard and cloud-side perception systems that inform, validate, and augment onboard autonomy.

This is not a purely research role — candidates will be expected to ship production-grade systems and apply state-of-the-art techniques to high-impact problems.

What You'll Do

• Own the design and implementation of computer vision ML models running in the cloud or on on-prem GPU clusters.
• Train and deploy models for semantic segmentation, feedforward 4D geometry, and learned preference modeling.
• Design and ship tools that predict deliverability and generate high-fidelity priors.
• Design evaluation and validation infrastructure for reliable field performance.
• Ship production features and models on a rapid iteration cycle.
• Lead architectural decisions and experimentation at the Senior level.
• Own roadmaps for offboard models and ML initiatives at the Staff level.

What You'll Bring

• 5+ years of experience for Senior or 8+ years for Staff building and deploying deep learning-based perception systems.
• Strong understanding of camera calibration, epipolar geometry, and structure-from-motion.
• Experience combining classical computer vision with modern ML methods such as multi-view models and gaussian splats.
• Hands-on experience with CNN, transformer, and foundation-style model architectures.
• Experience with training, data annotation, and evaluation pipelines.
• Ability to work across data pipelines, training infrastructure, and distributed systems.
• Experience deploying models in robotics or autonomy applications is required for Staff roles.
• Staff candidates should demonstrate roadmap ownership and experience building new ML initiatives.

Additional Information

Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and values diversity across its teams.