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ZiplineSan Francisco Bay Area
Lead Software Engineer
On-siteFull TimeNot disclosedPosted 20 days ago
About the role
Who you are
- A strong software engineering background and experience managing engineers working on developer platforms, infrastructure, build systems, or CI/CD
- Deep knowledge of modern build and CI systems, including remote execution, caching, artifact management, and distributed infrastructure
- Experience setting technical direction and delivering complex, cross-team projects with measurable results
- Strong technical judgment and the ability to stay close to architecture, implementation, and operational issues
- A developer-focused mindset and a track record of building tools that engineers rely on every day
- Experience hiring, coaching, and growing engineers
- Comfort working through ambiguity and creating structure around broad technical problems
- Clear communication skills and the ability to work across software, firmware, infrastructure, and engineering leadership
- 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 What the job involves
- 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
- 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 FlightSystems and cloud
- Expand our on-prem remote build execution platform and move more build and test workloads onto it
- Improve our Bazel build graph, remove bottlenecks, and make builds more hermetic and compatible with remote execution
- Simplify CI by moving build logic into Bazel and consolidating heavy workloads into common Buildkite pipelines
- Lead large migrations, including bringing firmware and other development workflows into the shared build and CI platform
- Define reliability goals, observability, capacity plans, and incident-response practices for critical developer infrastructure
- Hire, coach, and develop engineers while building a team culture centered on ownership, practical problem-solving, and strong internal customer support
- Partner with engineering leaders to set priorities and make clear tradeoffs between developer velocity, reliability, safety, and cost