Lead Software Engineer

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