About You and The Role
You will be the technical lead for Zipline’s strategic partner integrations, working directly with partner executives, product leaders, and engineering teams to bring drone delivery into their businesses. You will represent Zipline in leadership discussions, translate business priorities into technical decisions, and build alignment on integration scope, launch plans, and long-term roadmaps.
This is a hands-on Staff Software Engineer role. You will own the architecture and build the APIs, SDKs, and integration capabilities that enable partners to launch reliable delivery experiences. You should be equally comfortable leading an architecture review with engineers and explaining launch readiness, risks, and tradeoffs to a partner’s executive team. Success means earning partner trust, delivering on shared commitments, and turning individual integrations into a platform that scales.
What You’ll Do
Represent Zipline in partner leadership discussions. Lead conversations about technical strategy, launch readiness, and delivery risks. Translate complex issues into clear business implications, recommendations, and decisions.
Drive joint plans and commitments. Work with Commercial, Product, and partner teams to agree on scope, success criteria, milestones, and responsibilities. Surface dependencies early and negotiate practical tradeoffs when priorities or timelines change.
Enable partner experiences. Build frontend and backend SDKs that enable partners to build great customer experiences in their own apps, along with the integration framework, connector templates, and developer tooling to deliver partner API integrations quickly and consistently.
Set the platform architecture. Define clear interfaces between partner-specific connectors and Zipline’s core platform, keeping order lifecycle, authentication, authorization, data mapping, and monitoring consistent. Establish API and SDK versioning and compatibility practices so partners can adopt changes safely.
Make development self-service. Create sandbox environments, partner API simulators, and automated contract tests so engineering teams can develop and validate integrations independently.
Make launches repeatable. Establish integration acceptance criteria and automated release checks that verify correctness, failure handling, and operational readiness before production rollout.
Keep integrations reliable. Establish consistent retry, idempotency, and fallback behavior across partner APIs and webhooks. Define service reliability goals and own monitoring, runbooks, incident response, and remediation for integration failures.
Multiply engineering impact. Lead technical reviews and mentor engineers; use recurring implementation issues to improve the framework. Measure developer ramp time, integration delivery time, review effort, production defect rates, and SDK adoption to guide investment.
What You’ll Bring
Staff-level delivery. 7+ years building and operating production backend or distributed systems, with demonstrated ownership of architecture and delivery across services and teams.
Developer platform experience. Experience building developer platforms, SDKs, or internal tooling used by other engineers to ship production software, ideally for external API integrations. You treat API usability, documentation, and compatibility as part of the product.
Distributed systems depth. Strong skills in API design, data modeling, asynchronous workflows, schema evolution, eventual consistency, and idempotent processing.
Reusable integration design. Ability to turn varied external APIs into reusable connector patterns with clear boundaries and testable contracts, including experience with automated integration testing and development environments.
Production accountability. Demonstrated production ownership, including observability, on-call support, incident investigation, and improvements that prevent recurring failures. You can show how your work improved reliability or reduced integration effort.
Hands-on engineering depth. Deep proficiency in Go, Python, or a comparable backend language, with experience building libraries, command-line tools, or developer workflows that make other engineers productive.
Frontend SDK judgment. Experience building or supporting frontend libraries, SDKs, or embedded customer experiences, with the ability to reason about client-side integration, authentication, error handling, and usability in partner apps.
Leadership across teams. Define architecture and engineering standards across distributed engineering teams, enable independent execution through documentation and technical review, and align Product, Commercial, Finance, and Operations around platform priorities.
Executive partner communication. Demonstrated experience representing engineering in discussions with senior leaders at enterprise customers or partners. You can explain technical tradeoffs in business terms, make clear recommendations, and drive decisions with technical and nontechnical audiences.
Commercial and technical judgment. A track record of aligning customer expectations with engineering capacity and platform strategy. You can challenge a request constructively, communicate difficult news early, and build agreement on a credible path forward.
Thoughtful AI adoption. Use AI tools to improve implementation, testing, debugging, and review while taking responsibility for correctness, security, and maintainability.
What Else You Need To Know
The starting cash range for this role is $180,000 - $270,000. 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, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws or our own sensibilities.
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.
