Perception Engineer at FlyZipline

Department: Flight SW

Compensation

$200,000 – $280,000/yr

Location: South San Francisco, California
Type: Full-time
Level: senior
Posted: Jul 21, 2026

Description

Zipline is hiring senior and staff perception engineers for its Droid team to build and deploy real-time 3D perception models that convert multiple camera inputs into scene geometry and semantics for autonomous drone delivery. The role covers model training, evaluation, onboard optimization, visualization and introspection tooling, and collaboration with motion planning, with senior engineers leading architectural decisions and staff engineers owning roadmapping and cross-functional interfaces. Candidates need at least five years of experience for the senior level and eight years for the staff level, along with expertise in computer vision, robotics, and CNN or transformer architectures on resource-constrained hardware.

Required Skills

3D perception
Semantic segmentation
Multi-view stereo
TensorRT
CNN/Transformer
Sensor fusion
NVIDIA Jetson

Additional Information

Required Previous Experiences: At least 5 years of experience for the senior level or 8 years for the staff level building and deploying deep learning-based perception systems
Hands-on experience training, iterating, and optimizing CNN and transformer architectures on resource-constrained hardware
Experience with the full machine learning lifecycle, including training, data annotation, evaluation, and hard mining
Experience influencing design across data pipelines, training infrastructure, and compute requirements
Preferred Qualifications: Experience applying perception systems to hardware applications