Controls Engineer Intern (Fall 2026)
About The Position
Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service, aiming to serve all humans equally by ensuring access to food, medicine, and essential goods anytime, anywhere. They design, build, and operate the world’s largest autonomous logistics system, making millions of deliveries globally. The company operates on four continents and is redefining access to healthcare, consumer products, and food. Zipline seeks practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth, motivated by building systems with a direct, meaningful impact and scaling the future of logistics. 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 challenging conditions, using flight testing and simulation data to improve designs. Your work will involve making changes to systems that measurably improve the product, with the opportunity to see your contributions fly.
Requirements
- Applied math skills
- Experience with simulations and working with hardware
- Owned and developed 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
- 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
Benefits
- Full-time internship positions
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Intern
Education Level
No Education Listed
