Datacenter Automation Engineer Jobs (NOW HIRING)

You will be a Senior Software Engineer on Zipline's Infrastructure team, owning the infrastructure that runs our global autonomous delivery platform. Zipline operates safetycritical logistics at scale: we run private datacenters and edge compute to support flight operations, simulation, CI/CD, and production services that deliver millions of flights and timesensitive medical deliveries. This role sits at the intersection of hardware, virtualization, orchestration, and automation. Your work directly impacts deployment velocity, compute cost, and the reliability of systems supporting Zipline's operations.

• Own endtoend lifecycle for datacenter compute and storage: baremetal provisioning, hypervisor management, SAN/NVMe storage clusters, network configuration, and Kubernetes cluster lifecycle.
• Design, build, and operate automation that reduces manual setup time and increases deployment velocity: PXE/firmware workflows, dynamic inventory, image generation, fleet-wide configuration drift detection, and automated recovery playbooks.
• Deliver measurable reliability and scale improvements: set SLIs/SLOs for provisioning time, node commissioning success rate, cluster upgrade success rate, and mean time to recover (MTTR); own meeting those targets.
• Lead crossfunctional runbook and incident ownership for infra incidents affecting flight operations or telemetry: oncall rotation, incident commander for datacenter platform incidents, postmortems and action items.
• Instrument and maintain monitoring, alerting, and dashboards for hardware health, hypervisor performance, storage latency, Kubernetes control plane health, and cluster autoscaling behavior.
• Implement cost, capacity, and lifecycle management: capacity planning for compute/storage, automated reclamation, firmware/BIOS/hypervisor patch pipelines, and coldstandby / failover procedures for critical systems.
• Execute handson tasks when required: racking and cabling in datacenters, troubleshooting hardware failures, capture forensic logs, and coordinate physical repairs with vendors and field ops.

• 5+ years of engineering experience with at least 4 years owning production datacenter, virtualization, or infrastructure automation systems.
• Deep, handson expertise with baremetal provisioning and imaging (PXE/iPXE, IPMI, Redfish), hypervisors (KVM/qemu, ESXi or equivalent), and storage systems (Ceph, NVMeoF, SAN) at scale.
• Proven Kubernetes operations experience: cluster provisioning, upgrades, controlplane HA, kubeadm/cluster API or equivalent, CNI and CSI troubleshooting, and workload scheduling at multicluster scale.
• Productiongrade automation and coding skills in one or more languages (Python, Go, or Rust) and experience with CI/CD pipelines, Terraform/Ansible/Helm, and GitOps practices.
• Strong networking fundamentals: VLANs, BGP/EVPN at leaf/spine, LACP, routing, and network troubleshooting for cluster networking and storage fabrics.
• Oncall and incident experience: you have owned postmortems, SLIs/SLOs, and driven reliability improvements under operational pressure.
• Physical datacenter readiness: able to work onsite in South San Francisco HQ with regular inoffice cadence, plus occasional travel to partner datacenters or field sites and handson rack/cable/repair work when required.
• Security and safety mindset: experience operating in regulated or safetysensitive environments, following change control and audit processes.
• Clear communication and crossteam ownership: you will partner with flight software, field ops, hardware, and SRE teams and must translate operational needs into automated, testable systems.

This role is based in South San Francisco with an expectation of regular onsite presence and participation in oncall rotations and occasional travel to datacenter or field locations.

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.

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!