Pay
$127K–$190K is typical
The middle half of what similar US postings state. This one doesn’t list pay.
From 2,133 postings in the last year. Stated ranges, not salaries paid.
Senior Data Engineer - Data Platform
South San Francisco, California, USA
Open 3 months, first seen by us 105 days ago- Pay
Pay amount needs review — pay source
What Else You Need To Know The starting cash range for this role is $160.000-$200.000. Please note that this is a target, starting cash range for a candidate who meets the minimum qualifications for this role. The final cash pay for this role will depend on a variety of factors, including a specific candidate's experience, qualifications, skills, working location, and projected impact. The total compensation package for this role may also include: equity compensation; overtime pay; discretionary annual or performance bonuses; sales incentives; benefits such as medical, dental and vision insurance; paid time off; and more. 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.
Read the full posting- Work setting
- Not stated
- Employment
Full-time — employment source
Clear technical communication and influence. Experience with high-volume telemetry or sensor data, data observability, infrastructure-as-code, or safety-critical systems is strongly preferred. This is a full-time role based in South San Francisco. What Else You Need To Know
Read the full posting
What you’ll work on
Full postingDesign and operate cloud services for batch and near-real-time data ingestion and transformation
Build orchestration patterns, shared libraries, and CI checks for dataset publishing
Own lakehouse and warehouse foundations, including schema evolution, partitioning, and lifecycle
Establish data contracts, lineage, freshness, and quality checks
Diagnose bottlenecks and improve query performance and warehouse cost
From the employer’s posting
Design and operate cloud services for data ingestion, transformation, validation, and serving across batch and near-real-time pipelines.
Build orchestration patterns and shared libraries, templates, CI checks, and golden paths that standardize dataset publishing and transformations.
Own lakehouse and warehouse foundations, including table management, schema evolution, partitioning, workload isolation, access patterns, and lifecycle management.
Establish data contracts, metadata, naming, versioning, lineage, freshness, quality checks, and service objectives tied to operational and business impact.
Diagnose distributed-system bottlenecks and improve throughput, query performance, concurrency, storage efficiency, and infrastructure or warehouse cost.
About Zipline
Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service.
In the employer’s words · Read in context
Posting record
Report an errorOpen 3 monthsWe first saw this posting 105 days ago and it is still up. Roles open this long are often slow to fill or kept open to collect applications.
- Status in our records
- Live
- First seen by us
- Jul 22, 2026105 days ago
- Recorded sightings
- 178
- Last seen by us
- Nov 4, 2026
These dates show when we found the posting. Check the employer’s website to confirm it is still accepting applications.
How this job compares
Time since we first saw it
Day 105
Up longer than most. Similar jobs usually come down between day 6 and day 54.
From 10,845 similar postings that came down. Coming down is not always a hire.
Zipline is hiring
7 open jobs
Open jobs by the week we first saw them, last 12 weeks.
- Takes jobs down at a usual pace
See how this role fits your experience
Add your resume and we’ll mark which of these tools you already use, and point out anything in the posting that could rule you out.
- Python
- Rust
- AWS
- dbt
- Kubernetes
- Prefect
- Snowflake
- Airflow
Where the posting names them
What You'll Bring - 5+ years of professional software or data engineering experience, including production systems built primarily with Python or Rust. - Strong distributed-systems and data-systems foundations, with hands-on experience building and operating pipelines and data infrastructure at scale.
- Strong distributed-systems and data-systems foundations, with hands-on experience building and operating pipelines and data infrastructure at scale. - Experience with cloud infrastructure and production operations, ideally AWS and Kubernetes, plus workflow orchestration tools such as Prefect or Airflow. - Experience with modern data warehouses, preferably Snowflake, and lakehouse table formats, data modeling, and transformation workflows such as dbt.
- Experience with cloud infrastructure and production operations, ideally AWS and Kubernetes, plus workflow orchestration tools such as Prefect or Airflow. - Experience with modern data warehouses, preferably Snowflake, and lakehouse table formats, data modeling, and transformation workflows such as dbt. - Demonstrated judgment on cost, performance, and reliability, including production guardrails, backfills, idempotency, retries, safe deployments, and data-outage runbooks.
Your next step
Complete your application on www.zipline.com. The employer’s form will show what is required.
Applying through Greenhouse
- No account needed: the form is one page, with an “Autofill my application” option that reads your resume.
- Greenhouse doesn’t read resumes over 2.5 MB, or details placed in a header, footer, text box, table or second column. The file still attaches, but a recruiter has to type you in by hand.
Already applied? Track this application
About the role
We file this job under Data Engineer, by the work the posting describes.
Data engineers build and run the pipelines that copy data out of apps and outside services into a warehouse or lake, and fix them when a source changes or a load fails.
Expect SQL, Python, a cloud platform, a scheduler such as Airflow, and often tools for large data such as Spark or Kafka.
An analytics engineer works one step later, turning the raw data a data engineer lands into clean tables people can query.
US government figures for database architects
- Median yearly pay, May 2025
- $139,500
- Expected change, 2025 to 2035
- 9.4% more jobsagainst 3.5% for all jobs
The government has no code for data engineers, so these figures are for the closest group, database architects, which includes data integration and data warehousing specialists.
Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (May 2025) and Employment Projections (2025 to 2035). Occupation code 15-1243.
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
Zipline builds, manufactures, and operates autonomous delivery systems that move essential goods where they are needed. As a Senior Data Engineer on the Data Platform team, you will build cloud data foundations that turn application and operational telemetry into trusted inputs for delivery-system decisions, product analytics, and ML.
You will own the data backbone across ingestion, orchestration, lakehouse and warehouse systems, and shared engineering standards. Success means making operational telemetry and downstream datasets dependable, discoverable, performant, and cost-conscious for the teams building and operating Zipline’s delivery system.
What You'll Do
- Design and operate cloud services for data ingestion, transformation, validation, and serving across batch and near-real-time pipelines.
- Build orchestration patterns and shared libraries, templates, CI checks, and golden paths that standardize dataset publishing and transformations.
- Own lakehouse and warehouse foundations, including table management, schema evolution, partitioning, workload isolation, access patterns, and lifecycle management.
- Establish data contracts, metadata, naming, versioning, lineage, freshness, quality checks, and service objectives tied to operational and business impact.
- Diagnose distributed-system bottlenecks and improve throughput, query performance, concurrency, storage efficiency, and infrastructure or warehouse cost.
- Partner with service, telemetry, embedded, analytics, data science, and ML teams; lead technical reviews and align teams on durable platform interfaces and tradeoffs.
What You'll Bring
- 5+ years of professional software or data engineering experience, including production systems built primarily with Python or Rust.
- Strong distributed-systems and data-systems foundations, with hands-on experience building and operating pipelines and data infrastructure at scale.
- Experience with cloud infrastructure and production operations, ideally AWS and Kubernetes, plus workflow orchestration tools such as Prefect or Airflow.
- Experience with modern data warehouses, preferably Snowflake, and lakehouse table formats, data modeling, and transformation workflows such as dbt.
- Demonstrated judgment on cost, performance, and reliability, including production guardrails, backfills, idempotency, retries, safe deployments, and data-outage runbooks.
- Clear technical communication and influence. Experience with high-volume telemetry or sensor data, data observability, infrastructure-as-code, or safety-critical systems is strongly preferred.
- This is a full-time role based in South San Francisco.
What Else You Need To Know
The starting cash range for this role is $160.000-$200.000. Please note that this is a target, starting cash range for a candidate who meets the minimum qualifications for this role. The final cash pay for this role will depend on a variety of factors, including a specific candidate's experience, qualifications, skills, working location, and projected impact. The total compensation package for this role may also include: equity compensation; overtime pay; discretionary annual or performance bonuses; sales incentives; benefits such as medical, dental and vision insurance; paid time off; and more.
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!
Voluntary Self-Identification
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.
Source details
Source notes
Source excerptsSelected passages from the saved posting. Check the full description for conditions and exceptions.
- Pay
What Else You Need To Know The starting cash range for this role is $160.000-$200.000. Please note that this is a target, starting cash range for a candidate who meets the minimum qualifications for this role. The final cash pay for this role will depend on a variety of factors, including a specific candidate's experience, qualifications, skills, working location, and projected impact. The total compensation package for this role may also include: equity compensation; overtime pay; discretionary annual or performance bonuses; sales incentives; benefits such as medical, dental and vision insurance; paid time off; and more. 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.
- Location & working pattern
South San Francisco, California, USA
Working pattern and location restrictions need checking in the full posting.
- Work authorization
No clear work-authorization passage found. Eligibility is unconfirmed.