Mechanical Test Engineer, Hardware Validation (Senior - Staff)

Zipline • South San Francisco, CA

9d • Onsite

About The Position

Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service, focused on serving all humans equally by ensuring access to food, medicine, and essential goods. They design, build, and operate an autonomous logistics system, making deliveries globally. The company is seeking practical problem solvers motivated by building systems with a direct, meaningful impact. This role is within the hardware engineering organization, responsible for the design of flight hardware and operations equipment. The position is a hands-on individual contributor role focused on test strategy, fixture design, instrumentation, experimental execution, data analysis, manufacturing test, and failure investigation, working closely with design engineers while maintaining independent judgment on test adequacy, product risk, and release readiness.

Requirements

• Proven ownership of mechanical or electromechanical hardware validation through development, qualification, production ramp, and field deployment.
• Deep hands-on experience designing and building mechanical test rigs, fixtures, instrumented assemblies, and automated cycle-test systems.
• Strong mechanical fundamentals, including statics, dynamics, kinematics, fatigue, wear, materials, bolted joints, tolerance analysis, and FEA.
• Advanced CAD and drawing skills for test equipment, fixtures, interfaces, and released hardware.
• Practical experience selecting, installing, calibrating, and troubleshooting sensors and data-acquisition systems.
• Experience validating mechanisms containing actuators, transmissions, bearings, seals, sensors, PCBAs, harnesses, and embedded controls
• Demonstrated expertise in experimental design, measurement uncertainty, repeatability, sample-size selection, accelerated testing, and statistical confidence.
• Experience developing automated test and analysis tools using Python or an equivalent language.
• Track record finding root causes for complex or intermittent failures and verifying that corrective actions prevent recurrence.
• Experience testing environmental durability, high-cycle mechanisms, structural loads, abuse conditions, and fault recovery.
• Ability to translate imperfect field data into representative laboratory tests and actionable engineering conclusions.
• Experience working with design teams, suppliers, manufacturing, and technicians to execute test programs under aggressive schedules.
• Clear written and verbal communication, including concise test plans, reproducible reports, and evidence-based readiness recommendations.

Nice To Haves

• Mechanical curiosity, disciplined experimental practice, skepticism of weak evidence, calm troubleshooting, and willingness to remain with a problem until it is understood.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end validation of mechanisms, structures, enclosures, electromechanical assemblies, and mechanical interfaces from prototype through fleet deployment.
• Translate product requirements, hazard analyses, field conditions, customer workflows, and known failure modes into measurable test requirements and pass/fail criteria.
• Develop verification plans with clear coverage, traceability, sample sizes, margins, acceptance criteria, and exit gates.
• Design, analyze, build, commission, and maintain test stands, fixtures, environmental setups, automated cycle rigs, and representative system test articles.
• Select and integrate instrumentation such as load cells, torque sensors, displacement sensors, accelerometers, strain gauges, thermocouples, cameras, current sensors, and data-acquisition hardware.
• Produce drawings, tolerance analyses, safety reviews, BOMs, assembly instructions, calibration procedures, and maintenance documentation for test equipment.
• Apply free-body diagrams, hand calculations, tolerance analysis, kinematics, fatigue and wear models, and FEA to design test equipment and establish representative loading.
• Develop tests covering structural strength, mechanism performance, high-cycle life, wear, ingress, contamination, corrosion, temperature, humidity, misuse, obstruction, package variation, installation variation, and fault recovery.
• Validate interactions among mechanical hardware, actuators, sensors, electronics, embedded controls, packages, users, and droids.
• Automate test execution, data collection, health monitoring, fault detection, and reporting using Python or equivalent tools.
• Define sample sizes, acceleration factors, confidence levels, and statistical acceptance criteria that produce defensible reliability evidence.
• Correlate bench and accelerated tests with field telemetry, returned hardware, service records, and observed environmental conditions.
• Identify gaps between laboratory tests and field failures, then update test profiles to improve fidelity.
• Lead structured failure investigations using physical inspection, teardown, dimensional measurements, logs, instrumentation, and fault-tree methods.
• Distinguish product failures from fixture, instrumentation, software, setup, and operator-induced failures.
• Partner with Mechanical, Electrical, Embedded Software, Systems, Reliability, Manufacturing, Operations, and Safety to drive failures to root cause and permanent corrective action.
• Establish regression tests that detect hardware and software changes affecting mechanism performance, safety, or reliability.
• Present test evidence, unresolved risks, and release recommendations clearly during design and readiness reviews.
• Work directly with suppliers and manufacturing partners to validate components, tooling, processes, and production changes.
• Mentor engineers and technicians in fixture design, instrumentation, experimental methods, test execution, and failure analysis.
• Improve test throughput, repeatability, automation, lab utilization, and failure-to-answer time.

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
• Education Level: No Education Listed