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South San Francisco, California, United States
Onsite
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.
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 trust our team, so we’ll trust you. 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. We are a team that is constantly learning to improve our systems, and ourselves, and we can’t wait for you to join us!
Among our current challenges:
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. In this role, you will work alongside cross-functional partners to develop solutions to some of our trickiest problems.
A lot goes into flying vital supplies autonomously, but doing so reliably and at scale is an even bigger challenge. 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!
Embedded interns own a variety of big problems integral to our system! Examples of previous projects included:
This internship is a full-time position, in-person at our South San Francisco office. We will host our Fall 2026 interns from September to December.
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. Please let your point of contact at Zipline know if you require any accommodations throughout your interview process.
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.
