Electrical Engineer, Avionics

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

4h•$140,000 - $186,000•Onsite

About The Position

Zipline is hiring an entry-level Electrical Engineer for its Avionics team. The role contributes to the design, integration, validation, and release of electrical hardware for autonomous aircraft and supporting ground systems. The hardware must be safe, reliable, manufacturable, and suited to real-world use across changing environments, manufacturing variation, field operations, and evolving products. The engineer will work hands-on in the lab and collaborate with experienced electrical, mechanical, firmware, software, manufacturing, test, quality, supply-chain, and operations teams. The role is intended for someone with strong electrical engineering fundamentals and practical experience gained through industry work, internships, co-ops, research, capstone projects, competition teams, or personal builds. The engineer will learn quickly and grow toward deeper subsystem ownership over time.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or a related field.
1–3 years of industry experience.
Strong fundamentals in analog, digital, mixed-signal, power, sensing, and communication circuits.
Hands-on experience through coursework, internships, or projects with PCBAs, schematic capture, board bring-up, electrical debugging, or hardware validation.
Ability to use common lab equipment such as oscilloscopes, multimeters, power supplies, logic analyzers, or electronic loads.
Ability to read schematics, datasheets, test plans, and basic layout or manufacturing documentation.
Familiarity with structured debugging, documenting results, and communicating technical findings clearly.
Strong written and verbal communication skills, attention to detail, and willingness to learn from feedback.
Ability to collaborate onsite regularly with hardware, manufacturing, and test teams in South San Francisco.

Nice To Haves

Internship or project experience in avionics, aerospace, drones, robotics, automotive electronics, satellites, or other high-reliability hardware.
Experience with Altium Designer for schematic capture, PCB layout review, or release package generation.
Experience with Python, MATLAB, or similar tools for test automation, data analysis, or lab-equipment control.
Familiarity with embedded firmware development in C or C++, especially for board bring-up, diagnostics, or hardware-software integration.
Familiarity with CAN, UART, SPI, I2C, Ethernet, GNSS, radios, power electronics, battery systems, or sensor interfaces.
Exposure to environmental or reliability testing such as vibration, thermal cycling, or EMI/EMC-related work.

Responsibilities

Contribute to the design and development of avionics and ground-support PCBAs, including digital, analog, sensing, communications, power, and control circuits.
Support schematic capture, component selection, interface definition, and board-level integration with guidance from experienced engineers.
Help bring up new boards, run bench tests, collect data, and summarize results to support design validation and release decisions.
Work with PCB layout, mechanical engineering, and firmware teams to resolve interface, packaging, thermal, and manufacturability issues.
Support validation testing, troubleshooting, and root-cause investigations for issues discovered during bring-up, qualification, manufacturing, or flight testing.
Contribute to requirements, test procedures, design documentation, release packages, and change-control records for avionics hardware.
Participate in design reviews and learn to evaluate tradeoffs involving performance, reliability, manufacturability, weight, power, and cost.
Work with manufacturing, test, quality, and operations teams to support prototype builds, production readiness, and improvements to fielded hardware.
Ask questions early, document work clearly, and follow problems through to resolution.