Production Equipment & Tooling Design Engineer

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

About The Position

Zipline is the world’s largest autonomous delivery system, built to provide fast, reliable access to medicine, food, and other essential goods. We design, build, and operate high-performance logistics systems that serve customers across healthcare, retail, and government on four continents. Our Manufacturing Engineering team builds the production systems that turn complex designs into reliable, scalable hardware. We are looking for engineers who like solving practical problems, moving quickly, and building equipment that works in the real world. In this role, you will design and deliver the custom production equipment, fixtures, jigs, workstations, assembly aids, and test tooling that enable safe, repeatable, and scalable builds across our aircraft, zips, docks, and critical feeder subassemblies. This is a deeply cross-functional role. You will work closely with design engineers, manufacturing engineers, quality engineers, operations program managers, technicians, maintenance teams, and external vendors to bring equipment from concept through commissioning and sustainment. You will own equipment and tooling projects end-to-end: defining requirements, generating concepts, building CAD, releasing detailed designs, supporting fabrication, debugging on the floor, validating performance, and driving continuous improvement after launch. You are a hands-on mechanical designer with strong manufacturing instincts. You understand that great production equipment is not just functional—it is safe, ergonomic, robust, serviceable, and easy for operators and technicians to use. You move quickly, make sound engineering tradeoffs, and know how to turn ambiguity into practical hardware that improves throughput, quality, and cost.

Requirements

5+ years of experience designing manufacturing equipment, tooling, or fixtures in a production environment.
Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering or a related field.
Strong mechanical design skills, including GD&T, tolerance stack-up, mechanism design, and material/process selection.
Proficiency in 3D CAD; Siemens NX preferred.
Experience designing and releasing custom tooling for repeatable assembly of electro-mechanical products.
Hands-on experience supporting fabrication, build, debug, and commissioning of production equipment.
Familiarity with common factory hardware such as pneumatics, sensors, actuators, linear motion, and machine guarding.
Understanding of DFM/DFA, ergonomics, poka-yoke, and operator-centered tooling design.
Experience working cross-functionally with design, quality, technicians, and vendors in a fast-paced environment.
Strong judgment, ownership, and willingness to spend time on the manufacturing floor solving problems.

Responsibilities

Design custom production tooling, fixtures, jigs, workstations, automated and semi-automated equipment for Drone, Delivery pod, Dock, Zipline Dropbox, Subassembly and other builds.
Develop detailed 3D CAD, drawings, BOMs, preventative maintenance plans, and documentation for internal builds and external vendors.
Partner with manufacturing engineers to define and capture process requirements into robust, operator-friendly hardware.
Improve assembly quality and throughput through fixture design, error-proofing, ergonomics, and process simplification.
Support build events and production launches by troubleshooting tooling and equipment issues directly on the floor.
Drive vendor builds from quote to fabrication, assembly, debug, installation, and acceptance.
Create and refine tooling for operations such as alignment, joining, fastening, pressing, dispensing, inspection, and functional test.
Standardize tooling designs and components where possible to reduce cost, lead time, and maintenance burden.