Pros: My time at Zipline pushed me in many ways to be a better engineer and a better person and forever changed my outlook on the world. The expectations are high: you don't come in just to write code. There's no layer between you and your customer, between you and senior management, or between you and the international operations teams. You own projects from gathering requirements through ensuring the code is working well in the field. I was really invested in by my boss and other leaders. I was pushed to communicate better, take on more responsibility end-to-end, and to think critically about how I should best spend my time to move the needle for the company and the mission. The high "EQ" of the team was felt on the daily. First job I had where employees weren't treated as mules. Yes, the job was stressful, and yes, it is a business, but Zipline really did feel different from other places I've worked in that, on top of all of this, the team really did believe they could make a lasting positive difference in this world. That above all else made this worth it at the end of the day.

Cons: Zipline is not an easy, laid-back job: most people here apply more pressure to themselves than management applies. You'll be pushed and stretched to "wear many hats". The company grew a lot during my tenure, but they still are "scrappy" and the startup mentality is felt daily.

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: Really ambitious company that is trying to do a lot. There is no shortage of interesting work. If you are motivated individual contributor there are lots great projects

Cons: Almost all planning happens on slack. Almost all the planning is bottom up- so it can be frustrating sometimes to coordinate between teams.