Electrical Test Engineer (Senior-Staff)

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

14h•Onsite

About The Position

Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service, dedicated to ensuring access to food, medicine, and essential goods globally. They design, build, and operate an autonomous logistics system, having completed millions of deliveries across four continents. Their system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and has safely flown over 140 million commercial autonomous miles. Zipline seeks problem solvers motivated by building systems that have a direct, meaningful impact on people’s lives and scaling the future of logistics. The Avionics team is comprised of hardware, software, and test experts responsible for designing robust systems that control Zipline's drone delivery service in challenging environments. This includes designing aircraft avionics that perform in harsh climates and electromagnetic interference (EMI) environments. The Avionics system is crucial for high performance and reliability while minimizing mass and cost. The role involves delivering high-performance flight computers, communication, and navigation systems integrated into a new unmanned aerial system, aiming to expand Zipline's impact from 100,000 to 100 million deliveries annually. Success hinges on developing low-mass, low-cost, high-reliability avionics systems produced at high volumes, requiring rigorous design engineering, validation, and ingenuity in packaging, integration, fault tolerance, and certification. The company is looking for a test engineer with a strong electrical engineering background and experience in manufacturing test, design validation, system performance characterization, and certification.

Requirements

5+ years of experience in EE test engineering roles, with manufacturing test, system performance testing, certification, and design validation experience.
Bachelors and/or Masters degree in Electrical Engineering.
Past test engineering experience in sensors and electronics for critical systems in fields such as automotive, aerospace, transportation, or medical devices.
Test asset design validation for products in high-volume production environments.
Experience developing test plans, test requirements, test standards, and test criteria for hardware products, pcba’s, and sensors.
Proficient in Python, Linux environments, and scripting languages such as Bash or Shell.
Enthusiasm for collaborating in a fast paced, cross-functional environment.
Clear communication skills and the ability to explain technical challenges and solutions to fellow engineers and non-engineers alike.
Must be eligible to work in the US.
Must be able to work in-person at Zipline’s South San Francisco office.

Responsibilities

Own the design validation and test planning efforts for our avionics products; including both design validation and manufacturing test.
Develop a deep understanding of components under test becoming a subject matter expert in the component’s behavior under a range of environmental, performance, and system conditions.
Coordinate cross-functional teams and external vendors to deploy high quality test plans and test systems in a timely manner to support production timelines.
Drive end-to-end test campaigns from development through design validation, certification, and production (often working all facets simultaneously).
Triage and root-cause field failures, using data analysis, test heritage, correlation to operating conditions, and one-off test campaigns.
Support the certification testing to enable our aircraft to fly in the real world.