Hiring Manager

Best Guess

Job Description

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

The Autonomy team builds the systems that enable Zipline aircraft to operate safely and reliably in real-world environments. This includes perception, planning, controls, and the infrastructure that supports testing, deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement.

As Zipline scales its operations, quickly understanding and responding to real-world issues is critical. This role sits at the intersection of autonomy engineering and operations, helping ensure that issues observed in the field are accurately diagnosed, prioritized, and routed so the right teams can respond effectively.

As an Autonomy Triage Operations Engineer, you will be a first line of response for autonomy-related issues observed during test and commercial flight operations. You will review operational issue reports, analyze logs and telemetry, understand the context of each event, and form an initial diagnosis of what likely happened.

You will not be expected to solve every issue independently. Instead, your role is to quickly determine which systems may be involved, identify the right level of urgency, and provide clear, high-quality signal to the engineering or operations teams best positioned to respond.

Over time, you will develop a deep understanding of how Zipline’s autonomy systems behave in real-world conditions. Your work will help improve how we detect, classify, escalate, and resolve issues affecting safety, reliability, and fleet availability.

This is a high-impact role with broad exposure across autonomy, software, hardware, and operations teams.

What You’ll Do

Serve as a first line of response for autonomy-related issues in test and commercial operations
Review incoming operational issue reports and analyze logs, telemetry, metrics, and contextual information
Determine what likely went wrong and identify which systems may be involved
Classify failures, such as perception, planning, controls, infrastructure, integration, or external factors
Route issues to the correct engineering or operations teams with clear summaries and supporting evidence
Track, update, and route operational issues using tools such as Jira, Slack, Confluence, internal dashboards, or similar systems
Maintain clear investigation notes, escalation summaries, and triage documentation so engineering and operations teams can act quickly
Flag unclear, ambiguous, or high-risk cases and work with senior engineers to refine the diagnosis
Recommend severity and urgency based on operational impact
Identify recurring issues or patterns and escalate them for deeper investigation
Contribute to triage playbooks, documentation, workflows, and lightweight tooling improvements
Help improve the quality, speed, and consistency of autonomy issue triage across operations

What You’ll Bring

Experience working with logs, metrics, dashboards, telemetry, or debugging tools
Experience using collaboration, documentation, and issue-tracking tools such as Slack, Jira, Confluence, or similar systems
Strong analytical skills and attention to detail
Ability to recognize patterns across technical and operational data
Comfort making reasonable decisions with incomplete information
Good judgment about when to escalate and when to ask for help
Clear written communication, especially when summarizing complex technical issues
Ability to document investigations clearly and keep stakeholders updated through written channels
Ability to work across teams and identify the right stakeholders
Foundational understanding of autonomy systems, robotics, distributed systems, aviation systems, or complex software systems
Ability to work from Kigali, Rwanda and collaborate closely with local operations and remote engineering teams

Nice to Have

Experience in operations, QA, technical support, incident response, or reliability-focused environments
Familiarity with observability tools such as logs, dashboards, metrics, and alerts
Experience working cross-functionally with engineering, operations, or support teams
Exposure to autonomy systems such as perception, planning, controls, robotics, or navigation
Experience in aviation, robotics, logistics, or other safety-critical operational environments
Familiarity with tools such as Slack, Jira, Confluence, PagerDuty, Datadog, Grafana, Notion, Linear, Asana, ServiceNow, or similar systems
Scripting or data analysis experience, such as Python, SQL, or similar tools

What Success Looks Like

In this role, you will help Zipline respond faster and more effectively to autonomy-related issues in the field. You will improve the quality of operational signal reaching engineering teams, reduce ambiguity during incident response, and help identify patterns that lead to more reliable systems over time.

Your work will directly support the safety, reliability, and availability of Zipline’s autonomous delivery operations.

What Else You Need to Know

Must have legal right to work in Rwanda.
Must be willing and able to work for a period not less than 40 hours/week.
Employment type: Full Time.

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!

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Please Note

We have received reports stating that certain individuals are reaching out to people under false pretenses, claiming to be Zipline employees, affiliates, agents, or representatives. They may seek to gain access to your personal information or to acquire money from you by offering fictitious employment opportunities or by claiming that they are contacting you on Zipline’s behalf.

Genuine Zipline employees or representatives will never ask you for money or payment in exchange for employment opportunities or other related services. Any such offer of employment or any other service in exchange for fees that claims to be from us is deceitful and part of a fraud.

If you believe you have been targeted by a fraudulent party, we ask that you immediately get in touch with us via email at security@flyzipline.com upon receiving a suspicious offer or claim.