Pros: I learnt a lot about engineering with hands-on experience and ownership.

Cons: There weren't really any cons.

Pros: The engineers are humble and brilliant. Everyone is scrappy. The ego-to-skill ratio is <1 across the board. Teams are extremely fast moving. The company is extremely good at shipping V1 products and spiral designing the best solutions to actual customer needs with real world learnings. It's a rocket ship. Zipline is a place where you will viscerally feel the impact of your work. You can't help it. There are very few places where "impact" is measured in terms of direct quality of life improvement of your customers. Health outcomes literally equating to the number of children vaccinated, number of mothers saved from postpartum hemorrhaging, elimination of waste in medical systems, number of COVID-19 tests processed... It feels cliche this but it's true, the work Zipline does every day saves lives. Zipline is definitely not perfect - and going through many growing pains. But leadership has been reacting quickly, and is continuously course correcting while listening to employees.

Cons: The work Zipline has cut out for it is only getting harder. This is the kind of problem that excellent engineers salivate over. Hard, fun problems that have very real world consequences (both positive and negative). But this comes with large amounts of pressure to make this happen. Scaling technologies that have a hardware component in the field like this is extremely difficult. Zipline is not in the SaaS business - which comes with a large number of very real challenges, but also has powerful ramifications for operating at multi-national scale. Zipline is also in direct competition with some of the best funded companies in the world in the race to perfect instantaneous logistics.

Pros: It's largely a company of peers; everyone is approachable. There's minimal politics in the negative sense. Folk give direct feedback to each other and generally get along. Problems are solved pragmatically. Flight operators and manufacturing are revered by engineering. Individuals are given as much responsibility and ownership as they can handle. Folk at all levels are encouraged to focus on and supported in their personal development. The company has always been proactive, fair, and overly generous with periodic compensation adjustments in my experience.

Cons: It's honestly hard to come up with any cons. It's the best place I've worked and I currently have no plans on leaving. The company has grown quite a bit and there have been cultural pains at times, but it's mostly settled down to a stable equilibrium. I've heard criticisms from friends that are former coworkers, but nothing that I can't attribute to mismatched expectations or burnout. It's possible for folk to burn themselves out at Zipline like any other startup and many folk do, but I can't blame the "management" for that; in my experience, it's a very supportive environment in terms of maximizing health and happiness.