Autonomy Lead - Motion Planning

About Zipline

Do you want to change the world? Zipline is on a mission to transform the way goods move. Our aim is to solve the world’s most urgent and complex access challenges by building, manufacturing and operating the first instant delivery and logistics system that serves all humans equally, wherever they are. From powering Rwanda’s national blood delivery network and Ghana’s COVID-19 vaccine distribution, to providing on-demand home delivery for Walmart, to enabling healthcare providers to bring care directly to U.S. homes, we are transforming the way things move for businesses, governments and consumers. The technology is complex but the idea is simple: a teleportation service that delivers what you need, when you need it. Through our technology that includes robotics and autonomy, we are decarbonizing delivery, decreasing road congestion, and reducing fossil fuel consumption and air pollution, while providing equitable access to billions of people and building a more resilient global supply chain. Join Zipline and help us to make good on our promise to build an equitable and more resilient global supply chain for billions of people.

About You and The Role

You are excited about building the world’s largest fleet of autonomous aircraft to revolutionize one of the largest commercial needs in the world. You care deeply about finding simple solutions to complex problems, building high quality production level code, and seeing a problem through from initial design to large scale validation. You are comfortable communicating across a diverse engineering team, picking up new skills, and sharing that knowledge. You have the engineering judgment to devise the right solution to the problem, understand the pros and cons of different design choices and can lead a team to deliver.

Challenges you will face on the first day:

• Scaling our autonomy software to 10,000 deliveries a day across multiple metros
• Prototyping, testing, and refining autonomy software for next-generation delivery platforms, working alongside other software and hardware teams
• Developing collision avoidance solutions that allow us to operate in any real world environment, including navigating terrestrial obstacles
• Achieve safety and reliability goals for autonomous flight that push beyond the current state of the art and regulatory requirements

What You'll Do

• Lead the motion planning team to develop detect and avoid capabilities for autonomous aircraft
• Work cross functionally with other leaders of the Autonomy team to define detection requirements from our onboard acoustic and vision systems
• Identify areas to optimize our path planning algorithms to improve energy efficiency and reduce time of flight for our logistics operations
• Use HIL and SIL test environments to develop and validate planning algorithms
• Create hiring plans, interview plans and conduct regular performance reviews of the existing team
• Analyze data from real flight logs and large scale simulations to determine effectiveness and overall safety of the system
• Mentor more junior engineers and provide technical direction to the team

What You'll Bring

• 7+ years of professional experience and 2 + years leading a team developing software for hardware products in a safety-critical field, e.g. aerospace, robotics, medical devices, autonomous vehicles
• Expertise in writing safety critical code in one or more of: Rust, C++, C
• Demonstrated technical leadership in a production environment, writing software that runs on complex autonomous systems that operate in the real world
• Knowledge of planning and search algorithms with industry experience in robotics, manipulation, or autonomous driving
• Ability to build and use simulation and data analysis tools for evaluating system performance
• Experience building real-world robotics systems and handling the long-tail corner cases to ensure high uptime systems
• You can communicate effectively (verbally and written) and build strong relationships with internal business teams and external stakeholders

What Else You Need to Know

The starting cash range for this role is $190,000 - $230,000. Please note that this is a target, starting cash range for a candidate who meets the minimum qualifications for this role. The final cash pay for this role will depend on a variety of factors, including a specific candidate's experience, qualifications, skills, working location, and projected impact. The total compensation package for this role may also include: equity compensation; discretionary annual or performance bonuses; sales incentives; benefits such as medical, dental and vision insurance; paid time off; and more. Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, mental or physical disability, medical condition, genetic information, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, military or veteran status, citizenship, or other characteristics protected by state, federal or local law or our other policies. 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!