UTM Engineer - DoorDash Air

About the Team

The DoorDash Air team is bringing drone delivery to reality. To make this happen, we’re building a strong electrical team to design high reliability, high power density converters, and fault-tolerant controls electronics. Come join us to build a new class of aircrafts and deploy at scale.

DoorDash Labs, established in 2018, serves as the innovation hub for DoorDash, focusing on developing automation and robotics solutions to enhance last-mile logistics.

About the Role

We're hiring a Senior UTM Engineer who will build core components of DoorDash Air's internal route planning and airspace deconfliction stack — the systems that decide where our aircraft can safely fly, coordinate that with other operators and airspace authorities, and keep our internal stakeholders and external systems talking to each other in terms they understand.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and deploy interoperable services that must pass rigorous, often open-source, conformance and integration testing against external systems and partners.
• Develop novel path planning and airspace deconfliction algorithms that find safe, efficient routes through real-world, dynamic environments.
• Build tools that help our teams and systems evaluate and optimize airspace efficiency and utilization.
• Design integrations that connect the deconfliction stack to existing DoorDash systems, translating mission and airspace status into terms internal stakeholders can act on.
• Collaborate closely with systems engineering, commercial operations, and flight operations to ship features that hold up in real-world flight.
• Represent DoorDash Air externally — engaging with peer companies, working groups, and standards bodies to improve interoperable deployments industry-wide.

Qualifications

Required

• 5+ years of experience across the full lifecycle — design, build, deployment, and operation — of distributed systems in aviation, finance, communications, healthcare, or another field where interoperability, uptime, and safety criticality are core drivers.
• Experience building and shipping production services that interoperate with external systems, including passing external or open-source conformance/certification testing.
• Hands-on experience with path planning, routing, or deconfliction problems in real-world, dynamic environments, or algorithmic depth in graph search, optimization, or motion planning.
• Experience building evaluation and analysis tooling to provide visibility into system performance and efficiency.
• Experience designing integrations across organizational boundaries and translating technical system state for non-engineering stakeholders.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience with languages and paradigms common to safety- and uptime-critical distributed systems (e.g., C++, Python, Go, or similar, plus familiarity with real-time or fault-tolerant system design).
• BS/MS/PhD in CS, EE, Aerospace, Robotics, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice to Have

• Experience with airspace management, air traffic control, or UAS traffic management (UTM) concepts and systems.
• Experience contributing to or engaging with technical standards bodies or open-source interoperability efforts.
• Familiarity with certification-aware development processes (e.g., DO-178, ARP4761) common to safety-critical aerospace software.
• Experience with real-time or embedded systems, or with systems that must degrade gracefully under partial failure.