Controls Engineer Intern (Summer 2027)

Zipline • South San Francisco, CA

4h • Onsite

About The Position

Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service, aiming to serve all humans equally by providing access to essential goods. They design, build, and operate an autonomous logistics system, making millions of deliveries globally. The company is looking for practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth, motivated by building systems with a meaningful impact. The Flight Controls team is central to Zipline's product success, responsible for developing, testing, and maintaining critical flight software systems that enable autonomous aircraft operation from takeoff to landing. They develop novel solutions for responsiveness, robustness, and quality to ensure delivery platforms function in challenging conditions.

As an intern on the Flight Controls team, you will learn about flying autonomous aircraft in various conditions. You will use data from flight testing, simulation, and the global fleet to identify insights for design improvement. This role offers the opportunity to make tangible changes to systems that measurably improve the product, with contributions that will be seen in flight.

Requirements

• Applied math skills
• Interest in simulations and working with hardware
• Experience owning and developing controls solutions for a team project, thesis, or competition
• Exposure in one or more of the following areas: precision integrated inertial navigation, dynamic modeling of complex systems, linear control analysis, or optimal control with uncertainty.
• Software engineering skills, preferably with both embedded software (C, C++, Rust) and technical computing (MATLAB, python, Julia, etc.).
• Experience with Github and working in a multi-developer environment is an advantage.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the design, implementation, testing and release of innovative flight algorithms that improve the operational performance of our vehicle controllers
• Create tools and tests to demonstrate your design performance and protect against software regressions, using both theoretical guarantees and simulations
• Develop and improve simulation and other controls analysis tools so we can predict vehicle performance ahead of time and prove safety and reliability
• Analyze flight data to assess recent changes and upgrades, looking for regressions and potential areas for future improvement
• Design onboard integrity tests to communicate when the system performance is degraded
• Present key results and changes to the broader engineering team

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Intern
• Education Level: No Education Listed