Embedded Software Engineer Intern (Spring 2027)

Job Description

We are on a mission to serve all humans equally by ensuring access to food, medicine and essential goods anytime, anywhere. 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.
With more than 140 million commercial autonomous miles safely flown, Zipline is redefining access to healthcare, consumer products, and food across the globe.
Our team is motivated by building systems that have a direct, meaningful impact on people’s lives and by scaling the future of logistics. Zipline designs and operates the world’s largest drone delivery service providing access to critical medical supplies. Leading the way in drone delivery often means exceeding the capabilities of what’s available off the shelf, and as a result we need to engineer the majority of our system in-house. Doubling down on the reliability of our systems by writing embedded applications and drivers close to the hardware is a critical path to delivering to people whose lives will be meaningfully affected by smarter, more equitable access!
We’ll help you (and you’ll help us) find an area of technical ownership that you can dive deep into to define system requirements, develop creative and simple solutions, and prove with testing and data that your system meets the rigors and edge-cases of real-world deployment. Design and develop a software platform for the new P2 Zip and the world’s cutest Droid delivery and dock system
Scale our flight and distribution center software to allow upwards exponentially more deliveries per day
Prototype, test, and refine next generation flight and ground systems working alongside our mechanical and electrical engineering teams
Develop safe software architecture that will be deployed across the world
Achieve safety and reliability goals beyond the current state of the art
Do you love tinkering with mechanical and electrical devices and watching your code come to life? Does writing safety-critical low-level software intrigue you? Do you see your projects through from start to finish, regardless of what you’re working on?
Zipline is looking for interns to join our Embedded Systems team to advance our autonomous aircraft and ground systems. From deploying embedded software to devices across the world, fault response and handling, launching & landing, all the way to integration with our customer’s physical & software systems, you will work with and learn from not only some of the most impressive embedded engineers in the field, but from a huge variety of our amazing Zipline team!
Examples of previous projects included:
Building an RF radio test setup to validate antenna performance of the flight compute at the production end-of-line. Responsibilities include owning the entire system-from RF signal injection, testing, and validation, to developing manufacturing software test suites, integrating with Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL), and leveraging simulation to model and measure worst-case scenarios.
Develop firmware for a real-time coprocessor that manages high-frequency signals and I/O expansion for the Linux camera subsystem. Building a high data rate voltage and current telemetry system that runs continuously in our RTOS using ADCs, I2C devices and GPIO interrupts. Testing this feature rigorously, deploying it to production globally, building data analysis tools to verify that the feature is working properly, and using this data to root-cause tricky failures to improve the reliability of our systems.
Rapidly iterating on the concept of a new perception system, integrating compute modules and sensor prototypes to fly a proof of concept ASAP and de-risk key aspects of the approach.
Working with operations teams to identify ways to improve our ground systems behavior to enable faster aircraft launch and landing. Ultimately, rolling out the update to global operations!
Pursuing a degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or Computer Engineering. Must have at least completed the second year of your Undergraduate studies. Masters and PhD students are also eligible.
You’re comfortable working in one of C, C++, Python, or Rust, and have developed software for a real time operating system or embedded Linux.
You’re familiar with basic electrical engineering concepts, such as reading schematics, debugging with an oscilloscope, and communication protocols (CAN, SPI, UART, etc).
This internship is a full-time position, in-person at our South San Francisco office. We will host our Spring 2027 interns from (January 2027 – April 2027).
The hourly rate for this internship is $54 per hour. Additional benefits may include relocation support, a housing stipend, overtime pay, paid sick time, and other benefits, where applicable and subject to local requirements.
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.
Zipline is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities. For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. 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.