Software Engineering Manager – Developer Productivity

Skills this role screens for

About the role

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

You are the Software Engineering Manager for Zipline’s Developer Productivity team. Your team builds the tools and infrastructure that help engineers develop, test, and ship software across FlightSystems and cloud.

You will own the team’s roadmap, technical direction, and execution. Your work will improve the speed and reliability of CI, expand our use of remote build execution, simplify developer workflows, and support the long-term evolution of Zipline’s software platform.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You will grow and coach the team, stay close to technical decisions, and work directly with software, firmware, autonomy, and infrastructure teams to solve the problems slowing engineers down.

The work

What You'll Do

• Lead the team responsible for Zipline’s build systems, CI/CD infrastructure, remote execution, and developer tooling
• Own the roadmap for improving CI speed, reliability, and developer experience across our monorepo
• Support a fast-growing software engineering organization of about 200 people to improve velocity and developer experience
• Expand our on-prem remote build execution platform
• Work across teams to improve our Bazel build graph
• Be a thought leader in simplifying complex CI pipelines
• Lead large build system migrations to move more projects into the monorepo’s build system
• Set priorities for the developer productivity team by talking with customers to identify pain points, and defining metrics to track productivity
• Hire, coach, and develop engineers while building a team culture obsessed with building great developer experiences

Also

What You'll Bring

• Experience building top-performing software teams
• Solid software engineering fundamentals
• Deep knowledge of modern build and CI systems, including remote execution, caching, artifact management, and distributed infrastructure
• Current understanding of AI-enabled developer workflows, with the ability to evaluate and adopt emerging tools that improve developer productivity and code quality across large codebases
• Experience setting technical direction and delivering complex, cross-team projects with measurable results
• Obsession with engineering velocity, removing friction, and building great tools
• Passion for building strong relationships with stakeholder teams
• High-bandwidth communications across many software engineering disciplines
• Metric-driven mindset

Nice to have

Bonus Points

What Else You Need To Know

The starting cash range for this role is $182,000 – $230,000 depending on experience. This is a target starting range for a candidate who meets the minimum qualifications; the final cash offer will depend on experience, qualifications, skills, working location, and projected impact. The total compensation package for this role also includes equity compensation and benefits (medical, dental, vision, PTO, 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.

• Experience with Bazel, Buildkite, BuildBarn, AWS, Linux, Docker, or large monorepos
• Experience with C++, Rust, Python, Go, or TypeScript
• Experience supporting robotics, embedded systems, hardware-in-the-loop testing, or safety-critical software
• Experience leading major build-system, CI-platform, or repository migrations