> AI agents: this is one page of Nextmove’s FDE site, in Markdown. Nextmove is a job board and free career service for forward deployed engineers (FDEs). Each posting is classified from its text, not its title: the kind of work, how much of it is production code, pre-sales weight, time at customer sites, travel, remote arrangement, level and posted base pay. The site also publishes the aggregates: median pay by level, metro, company and kind of work, and which companies started hiring FDEs each week. Every page under https://nextmove.md/fde is served this way; the index of pages is https://nextmove.md/llms.txt. # Staff Software Engineer – Integrations Platform Canonical URL: https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/707396a854796719 Zipline posts a staff FDE role to build what the customer runs in South San Francisco, CA, at $180,000–$270,000 base, level with the staff+ FDE median of $225,000 across 388 postings with pay. Lead partner technical strategy, launch planning, and executive discussions. Read from the employer’s posting on November 8, 2026. - [Zipline](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/zipline) Posted Oct 8, 2026 by Zipline · open on Greenhouse as of Nov 8, 2026 **$180,000–$270,000** + equity South San Francisco, CA Lead partner technical strategy, launch planning, and executive discussions. - [See roles that fit me](https://nextmove.md/sign-up?from=%2Ffde%2Fjobs%2F707396a854796719&placement=top) - [View posting at Zipline](https://www.zipline.com/open-roles/8017330003?gh_jid=8017330003) Free. Upload your resume once, see why each FDE role fits, and get introduced only when you say so. ## At a glance ### Posted base pay $180K–$270K Level with the median Midpoint $225K · median $225K This job $180K to $270K. Staff+ FDE postings, 388 postings: the middle 50% of posted pay is $197K to $262K, median $225K. ### The work Builds what the customer runs Balance **Mostly building** Project stages 1. Pre-sales (not covered) 2. Proof of concept (not covered) 3. Implementation 4. Operations - **Coding**: Writes production code - **Builds for**: External customers - **Level**: Staff+ - **Role**: Technical lead ### What they ask for Experience - **7+ years** Building and operating production backend or distributed systems Background - **Software engineering** ### Do you meet what the posting states? The posting asks for 7+ years. How many do you have? The posting reads as a staff-level role. What level are you at now? The job is in South San Francisco, CA. Could you work there? Which of these have you used in production? Answer each one. Nothing is saved or sent. [What postings ask for, by background →](https://nextmove.md/fde/paths) ## Conditions - **Location**: South San Francisco, CA - **Pay**: ## More like this [Distyl AI](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/distyl-ai) ### [Infrastructure Engineer, Customer Delivery](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/520c15eff228e659) San Francisco, CA · New York, NY Hybrid 3w ago $200,000–$250,000 [Amazon (incl AWS)](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/amazon-incl-aws) ### [Sr Forward Deployed Engineer, Forward Deployment Engineering](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/5b9357990c31169e) East Palo Alto, CA · Boston, MA · +3 more 2w ago $168,100–$261,500 [Suki AI](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/suki-ai) ### [Staff Forward Deployed Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/12d765d673cd368d) Redwood City, CA New · 2d ago $225,000–$250,000 ## The job description from Zipline Posted by Zipline on Oct 8, 2026 ### 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 You will be the technical lead for Zipline’s strategic partner integrations, working directly with partner executives, product leaders, and engineering teams to bring drone delivery into their businesses. You will represent Zipline in leadership discussions, translate business priorities into technical decisions, and build alignment on integration scope, launch plans, and long-term roadmaps. This is a hands-on Staff Software Engineer role. You will own the architecture and build the APIs, SDKs, and integration capabilities that enable partners to launch reliable delivery experiences. You should be equally comfortable leading an architecture review with engineers and explaining launch readiness, risks, and tradeoffs to a partner’s executive team. Success means earning partner trust, delivering on shared commitments, and turning individual integrations into a platform that scales. ### What You’ll Do - **Represent Zipline in partner leadership discussions.** Lead conversations about technical strategy, launch readiness, and delivery risks. Translate complex issues into clear business implications, recommendations, and decisions. - **Drive joint plans and commitments.** Work with Commercial, Product, and partner teams to agree on scope, success criteria, milestones, and responsibilities. Surface dependencies early and negotiate practical tradeoffs when priorities or timelines change. - **Enable partner experiences.** Build frontend and backend SDKs that enable partners to build great customer experiences in their own apps, along with the integration framework, connector templates, and developer tooling to deliver partner API integrations quickly and consistently. - **Set the platform architecture.** Define clear interfaces between partner-specific connectors and Zipline’s core platform, keeping order lifecycle, authentication, authorization, data mapping, and monitoring consistent. Establish API and SDK versioning and compatibility practices so partners can adopt changes safely. - **Make development self-service.** Create sandbox environments, partner API simulators, and automated contract tests so engineering teams can develop and validate integrations independently. - **Make launches repeatable.** Establish integration acceptance criteria and automated release checks that verify correctness, failure handling, and operational readiness before production rollout. - **Keep integrations reliable.** Establish consistent retry, idempotency, and fallback behavior across partner APIs and webhooks. Define service reliability goals and own monitoring, runbooks, incident response, and remediation for integration failures. - **Multiply engineering impact.** Lead technical reviews and mentor engineers; use recurring implementation issues to improve the framework. Measure developer ramp time, integration delivery time, review effort, production defect rates, and SDK adoption to guide investment. ### What You’ll Bring - **Staff-level delivery.** 7+ years building and operating production backend or distributed systems, with demonstrated ownership of architecture and delivery across services and teams. - **Developer platform experience.** Experience building developer platforms, SDKs, or internal tooling used by other engineers to ship production software, ideally for external API integrations. You treat API usability, documentation, and compatibility as part of the product. - **Distributed systems depth.** Strong skills in API design, data modeling, asynchronous workflows, schema evolution, eventual consistency, and idempotent processing. - **Reusable integration design.** Ability to turn varied external APIs into reusable connector patterns with clear boundaries and testable contracts, including experience with automated integration testing and development environments. - **Production accountability.** Demonstrated production ownership, including observability, on-call support, incident investigation, and improvements that prevent recurring failures. You can show how your work improved reliability or reduced integration effort. - **Hands-on engineering depth.** Deep proficiency in Go, Python, or a comparable backend language, with experience building libraries, command-line tools, or developer workflows that make other engineers productive. - **Frontend SDK judgment.** Experience building or supporting frontend libraries, SDKs, or embedded customer experiences, with the ability to reason about client-side integration, authentication, error handling, and usability in partner apps. - **Leadership across teams.** Define architecture and engineering standards across distributed engineering teams, enable independent execution through documentation and technical review, and align Product, Commercial, Finance, and Operations around platform priorities. - **Executive partner communication. **Demonstrated experience representing engineering in discussions with senior leaders at enterprise customers or partners. You can explain technical tradeoffs in business terms, make clear recommendations, and drive decisions with technical and nontechnical audiences. - **Commercial and technical judgment. **A track record of aligning customer expectations with engineering capacity and platform strategy. You can challenge a request constructively, communicate difficult news early, and build agreement on a credible path forward. - **Thoughtful AI adoption.** Use AI tools to improve implementation, testing, debugging, and review while taking responsibility for correctness, security, and maintainability. ### What Else You Need To Know The starting cash range for this role is $180,000 - $270,000. 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. [View posting at Zipline](https://www.zipline.com/open-roles/8017330003?gh_jid=8017330003) ## About Zipline Designs, manufactures, and operates autonomous drone delivery networks for healthcare systems, governments, retailers, and restaurants, combining full-stack aircraft, infrastructure, and logistics software. Late-stage private · 500–1000 people ## Similar jobs [ServiceNow](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/servicenow) ### [Staff Software Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/ccce31439d4dfefe) Santa Clara, CA 6w ago $166,500–$291,400 [6sense](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/6sense) ### [Staff Data Scientist, Forward Deployed](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/858a50fe32ba1077) San Francisco, CA Remote 12d ago $194,736.75–$265,613.9 [Luminai](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/luminai) ### [Forward Deployed Engineer, Team Lead](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/f54c517d3cf04a24) San Francisco, CA · New York, NY Hybrid 2mo ago $190,000–$270,000 [Veeam Software](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/veeam-software) ### [Senior Forward Deployed Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/8b90677b8c9d0226) San Jose, CA Hybrid 7w ago $158,520–$294,360 [Standard Bots](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/standard-bots) ### [Staff Forward Deployed Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/63104783ef6d97b3) San Francisco, CA · New York, NY On-site 6w ago $215,000–$275,000 - [Compare staff+ FDE salary ranges](https://nextmove.md/fde/salary/staff) - [Similar jobs in SF Bay Area](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs?region=sf-bay-area) - [Similar jobs that build what the customer runs](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs?role=builds-for-customers) Hiring at Zipline and want this page changed or removed? 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