Director of Software Engineering

About Zipline

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.

About You and The Role 

As the Director of the Marketplace engineering organization, you will lead the teams that connect customers and merchants to Zipline’s drone delivery network. This spans the Zipline app that consumers turn to every day to order meals that arrive hot, groceries without a trip to the store, and home essentials when in need. This also includes partner tools like how we integrate into restaurant kitchens, how we connect to retailers’ catalogs, and how we power on-demand fulfillment to enable checkout-to-delivery in as little as 10 minutes. The Marketplace org also builds tools to power customer support, services like pricing and prioritization, growth optimization, and the tooling to enable high-velocity engineering development for this team.

This is a rare chance to shape the software, organization, and operating model behind a delivery network built to give people more time. You will set direction across a broad product scope and tall technical stack, lead a fast-growing team, and ultimately turn an ambitious vision into a world-changing service.

What You'll Do 

• Lead and grow an A-team of software engineers and managers.
• Establish a clear technical and product strategy that balances near-term delivery with long-term velocity.
• Build reliable, scalable marketplace products and make sound decisions about architecture, platform investments, and technical debt.
• Partner closely with a small-but-might product team to build an uncompromising experience for consumers.
• Create strong operating rhythms to provide predictability and visibility for the rest of Zipline.

What You'll Bring

• A track record of leading and scaling product engineering teams that ship operationally-complex software.
• Strong technical judgment and the ability to guide architecture and execution to enable a lean team to get a lot done.
• Demonstrated experience building organizations, developing leaders, and attracting exceptional technical talent.
• Excellent product sense, prioritization skills, and cross-functional partnership.
• Comfort operating in ambiguity, leading the organization to find clarity amongst the chaos.

Nice to Have

• Experience with marketplace, e-commerce, pricing, or two-sided-platform products.
• Thought leadership on this new AI-driven way of building software.

**What Else You Need To Know

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The starting cash range for this role is $250,000-$300,000. 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; overtime pay; 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!

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.

As set forth in Zipline ’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.