Mechanical Engineer

Zipline • South San Francisco, CA

6d

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. The company designs, builds, and operates the world’s largest autonomous logistics system, making millions of deliveries globally. Zipline operates on four continents, with a delivery occurring every 30 seconds. Their system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and provides significant time savings. With over 140 million commercial autonomous miles safely flown, Zipline is redefining access to healthcare, consumer products, and food worldwide. The company seeks practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth, motivated by building systems with a direct, meaningful impact on people's lives and scaling the future of logistics. They are looking for individuals who sculpt from first principles, enjoy facing adversity, and can achieve the impossible at record speeds.

Zipline builds autonomous delivery aircraft and ground systems that operate daily in various field conditions. The Mechanical Engineer will own hardware that directly affects flight safety, fleet reliability, manufacturability, and the speed of scaling service to new regions. The Ground Systems team is responsible for all infrastructure enabling Zips to take off, fly, land, charge, and prepare for missions. Their goal is to develop elegant integration solutions that are modular, cost-effective, and adaptable to various building structures and sites worldwide for diverse customers.

Requirements

• 5–10+ years of mechanical/electromechanical design engineering experience delivering complex subsystems or products through NPI into production.
• Proven track record owning complex subassemblies or full systems over at least 2 product programs (concept, prototype, validation, production).
• Strong mechanical engineering fundamentals including load estimation, structural hand calcs, FEA, material selection, clean CAD designs and design-for-assembly/field-service practices.
• Demonstrated experience designing mechanisms and actuator systems, including selection and integration of motors, gearboxes, bearings, linear actuators, springs, linkages, sensors, and other motion-control components.
• Experience evaluating mechanism kinematics, actuator loads, friction, efficiency, backlash, compliance, duty cycle, wear, fatigue, and life.
• Practical knowledge of manufacturing methods such as welding, sheetmetal forming, extrusion, CNC machining, injection molding, etc.
• Experience partnering with contract manufacturers to ramp up production of high volume lines.
• Strong CAD and documentation skills: able to own 3D assemblies and 2D detail drawings for 20–100 part systems; experience with NX, SolidWorks, or equivalent.
• Disciplined processes: Your parts are released, BOMs are maintained, SOPs created for builds, and timelines are up-to-date.
• Excellent written, verbal, and visual communication. You know how to tailor to your audience with the right level of technical depth to be as effective as possible, including using basic tools in place of full CAD when it makes sense.
• Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering or a related discipline.
• Ability to periodically (<10%) travel to visit customers and suppliers.

Nice To Haves

• NX is your primary CAD tool.
• Experience designing autonomous machinery, robotics, industrial automation, aerospace ground equipment, material-handling systems, or other electromechanical products.
• Experience developing custom actuators, drivetrains, latching systems, or compliant mechanisms.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end delivery of mechanical and electromechanical subsystems, from requirements definition through concept development, design, build, verification, release, production ramp, and sustaining engineering.
• Produce and defend system-level trade studies, tolerance stacks, load paths, failure modes, and hand-calcs that bound designs for safety-critical loads and manufacturability.
• Create CAD assemblies, detailed drawings, GD&T, and manufacturing documentation for 20–100 part assemblies; own design reviews, DFM, and first-article criteria.
• Develop and execute verification plans (environmental, fatigue, vibration, thermal, EMI/EMC where applicable), build test rigs/fixtures, run test campaigns, analyze results, and close findings with corrective actions and measurable reliability improvements.
• Lead supplier selection, qualification, and handoff: drive DFM feedback, define inspection criteria, and reduce supplier NPI cycle time and scrap rates. Own escalation and remediation when supplier output risks field operations.
• Partner daily with Systems, Software, Production, Integration & Test, Reliability, and Field Ops to align requirements, manage trade-offs, and eliminate deployment blockers.
• Translate prototypes into designs that meet target cost, cycle time, and inspection rates for medium-volume production; own metrics for manufacturability and in-field reliability and drive them to target.
• Serve as a technical authority in design reviews and postmortems; lead incident root-cause investigations when field events occur.
• Mentor peers and junior engineers, and raise the quality of mechanical design practices across the team.

Benefits

• Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws or our own sensibilities.
• We value diversity at Zipline and welcome applications from those who are traditionally underrepresented in tech. If you like the sound of this position but are not sure if you are the perfect fit, please apply!

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior