Head of Systems Engineering

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

54d•$225,000 - $275,000

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, delivering critical supplies quickly and reliably across four continents. Zipline operates on a global scale and is seeking practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth. The team is motivated by building systems that have a direct, meaningful impact on people’s lives and by scaling the future of logistics. The ideal candidate sculpts from first principles, enjoys facing adversity, and can achieve the impossible at record-breaking speeds. This role will lead the systems engineering team responsible for defining the product capabilities roadmap, decomposing those capabilities into concrete architectures for engineering teams, and system validation & verification of new capabilities across current and novel autonomous aircraft concepts. The company is planning significant scaling in 2026 and 2027, including a 10x increase in deliveries per day, a 5x ramp in range, expansion into more complex airspaces and environments in the US, and global expansion. This is a key leadership position focused on enabling safe scaling into complex environments, defining the right architecture for safety and cost goals across hardware and software revisions, and balancing competing objectives like range, acoustics, delivery throughput, and cost.

Requirements

Demonstrated leadership delivering complex technical solutions amid ambiguity, competing priorities, and a broad cross-functional organization.
A track record of shipping high-reliability, safety-critical autonomous systems into real-world operation.
Deep systems-engineering experience with product requirements, architecture, interface definition, system decomposition, verification planning, and validation.
Technical judgment in safety-critical autonomy, including fail-safe, fault-tolerant, and fail-operative approaches that sustain safe operation through faults.
Experience making principled tradeoffs among safety, performance, cost, and operational constraints using models, metrics, and test evidence.
Ability to develop technical leaders and communicate clear system decisions across engineering, safety, regulatory, and operational partners.

Responsibilities

Serve as a trusted technical expert of high-reliability, safety-critical autonomous systems owning system level architecture, requirements, metrics, and test coverage to ensure we ship the right product capabilities, safely.
Define interfaces and drive cross disciplinary discussions to align on the right architectures to meet our goals.
Develop frameworks and facilitate trade studies to optimize for performance, safety, and cost.
Create and maintain systems models and diagrams.
Set the bar for hardware and software release standards and test requirements.
Partner with safety engineering and regulatory team to prove flight worthiness to regulators.
Grow and mentor a world-class Systems Engineering team as well as mentor those in adjacent teams.
Drive multi-year technical roadmap across the product.