Staff Cloud Release Engineer - Deployment & Validation Systems, Zipline , CA, US

Do you want to change the world? Zipline is on a mission to transform the way goods move. Our aim is to solve the world’s most urgent and complex access challenges by building, manufacturing and operating the first instant delivery and logistics system that serves all humans equally, wherever they are. From powering Rwanda’s national blood delivery network and Ghana’s COVID-19 vaccine distribution, to providing on-demand home delivery for Walmart, to enabling healthcare providers to bring care directly to U.S. homes, we are transforming the way things move for businesses, governments and consumers.

 

The technology is complex but the idea is simple: a teleportation service that delivers what you need, when you need it. Through our technology that includes robotics and autonomy, we are decarbonizing delivery, decreasing road congestion, and reducing fossil fuel consumption and air pollution, while providing equitable access to billions of people and building a more resilient global supply chain.

 

Join Zipline and help us to make good on our promise to build an equitable and more resilient global supply chain for billions of people.

About You and the Role:

As a Release Engineer at Zipline, you will play a crucial role in upgrading cloud validation and deployment validation systems. Zipline is operating a complex suite of services that interact with safety critical devices in the real world; in this role, you will help battle test and drive projects to improve confidence in system updates before we deploy to production. This role is essential for developing new systems and processes to ensure reliable software rollouts across increasingly complex changes and environments.

What You'll Do  

• Develop Deployment and Validation Systems: Design and implement robust deployment strategies that ensure high reliability and stability in our software releases. Work with tools like Kubernetes and ArgoCD to manage the deployment lifecycle across multiple environments and namespaces. Incorporate integration validation and regression testing of cloud services into the deployment workflow to ensure that changes interact correctly with existing systems and do not introduce regressions.
• Lead Deployment Strategy Innovations: Spearhead initiatives to improve environment propagation and rollout mechanisms, drawing on proposals and current best practices within the industry to enhance our deployment philosophy. Ensure strategies include automated load test suites and integration checkpoints for cloud-native services.
• Own the service validation story: Create and manage pipelines for phased mutations of Kubernetes objects and infrastructure that represent services, ensuring deployments meet all testing and stability prerequisites before promotion to production environments. This includes load testing, running regression tests on fully deployed apps with shadowed traffic.
• Coordinate Across Teams: Work closely with all software teams to ensure that deployment strategies are aligned with the overall technical architecture and company objectives. Ensure clean slate deployments through effective coordination strategies akin to merge queues.
• Monitor and Optimize Release Systems: Implement and oversee monitoring tools such as Prometheus for continuous deployment assessments. Support developing comprehensive readiness and liveness probes for services to ensure operational integrity post-deployment.

What You'll Bring 

• Extensive experience in release engineering, with a deep understanding of Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud-based deployment strategies.
• Proven ability to design and implement complex validation systems in a high-reliability environment.
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills to effectively work across multiple teams - loves working with your customer teams.
• Experience with monitoring tools (like prometheus, open telemetry) and deployment gating mechanisms.

What Else You Need to Know