Staff Security Engineer - Product Security at Zipline · South…

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 and operates fleets of delivery drones to get medicine to those who need it, fast, regardless of where they live. To power this, the software team is building out the long term scalable solutions to expand rapidly while empowering our world class distribution centers to serve their customers as fast as possible.

Zipline’s security problems aren’t “website got pwned” problems (though those exist too). They’re “real-world autonomy + robotics + global operations + cloud software + regulated/health-adjacent workflows” problems. You’ll partner deeply with software, infrastructure, and (where relevant) embedded/autonomy teams to reduce real risk in real systems. We have a large attack surface

Our ideal candidate works well in startup environments, wears many hats, and collaborates across engineering disciplines. You’ll join a small, high-ownership security team with significant influence over how we scale.

A note on our modern reality and agentic tooling:

Engineering teams are increasingly adopting LLM copilots and agentic tools to move faster. That’s useful, until an “assistant” becomes an unmonitored automation path to secrets, sensitive data, or privileged actions. (Think: “obedient intern with production credentials.”) Industry guidance is converging on practical frameworks like the NIST AI Risk Management Framework (including a profile for generative AI) and the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications, which explicitly calls out risks like prompt injection, insecure plugin design, and excessive agency.

In this role, you’ll help Zipline safely leverage these tools while containing them so they don’t quietly “rewrite the threat model”.

This is a Hybrid onsite role - you will frequently have conversations in person at our HQ in South San Francisco.

What You'll Do

• Own security outcomes for critical parts of Zipline’s application and cloud ecosystem (not by writing policy docs that no one reads, but by shipping controls and enabling teams).
• Partner with engineering teams on secure architecture, threat modeling, and design reviews for services that must be correct, reliable, and defensible under real-world operational pressure.
• Help us build and scale a pragmatic secure SDLC – CI/CD hardening, dependency/supply-chain controls, secrets management, and code review patterns that don’t slow teams down.
• Improve cloud security posture end-to-end: IAM and least privilege, network/service-to-service trust, key management, logging/telemetry, runtime detection, and incident-ready auditability.
• Drive vulnerability management that actually closes risk: triage, exploitability analysis, remediation partnerships, and verification.
• Help build and exercise incident response: playbooks, tabletop exercises, logging requirements, and “know it happened / know what changed” operational discipline.
• Support data classification and access control models aligned to how Zipline operates (including partner/customer interfaces and global operations).
• Support external penetration tests and turn results into durable improvements, not whack‑a‑mole patches.
• Contribute to security compliance efforts (e.g., SOC 2 / ISO 27001) in a way that strengthens engineering
• Secure AI-assisted and agentic engineering workflows (this is explicitly part of the job):
  • define safe patterns for copilots/LLM tools used in development and ops
  • implement guardrails for sensitive data exposure and output handling
  • prevent “agentic overreach” (over‑privileged tools, unsafe tool-calling, silent action-taking)
  • build monitoring/auditing around AI tool use where it matters

What You'll Bring

• 8+ years of experience designing, building, and operating security controls for large-scale production systems (application, cloud, and infrastructure security).
• Strong security engineering chops with evidence you can reduce risk in production systems (not just talk about it).
• Hands-on ability to write and ship code/tools in Python, Go, or similar (you’re expected to build, not just review).
• Practical experience securing microservice architectures and modern cloud stacks (containers/Kubernetes, IAM, CI/CD, secrets, logging).
• Comfort operating as a technical leader without authority: you can persuade, teach, and unblock - not police.
• A skeptical mindset: you naturally ask “what’s the failure mode?” and “how will this be abused?” before shipping changes.
• Familiarity with the security failure modes of LLM-enabled systems (or the willingness to learn fast), including risks called out by OWASP such as prompt injection, insecure output handling, insecure plugin design, and excessive agency.

Nice To Haves

• Experience spanning multiple engineering domains (web app + cloud infra + embedded/robotics/autonomy).
• Experience building developer-friendly security platforms (internal libraries, paved roads, CI integrations, Public Key Infrastructure).
• Track record of being an effective security “evangelist” (i.e., enabling good behavior with good tools and defaults, not fear).
• Experience designing guardrails for internal AI/agent usage (policy + technical controls + auditing), especially in environments where safety and reliability are non-negotiable.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems and how failures actually happen (partial outages, weird retries, cascading dependencies, misconfigurations, permissions drift).

What Else to Know

This will be an in-office or hybrid role based out of our South San Francisco HQs.

The starting cash range for this role is $230,000 - $275,000; please note that this is a target, starting cash range for a candidate who meets the minimum qualifications for this role. We are always open to negotiation. 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.