Senior Controls Engineer

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

12h•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. The company designs, builds, and operates an autonomous logistics system, completing millions of deliveries across four continents, including blood, vaccines, medical supplies, food, and retail products. Zipline's system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and redefines access to critical items. The Flight Controls team is crucial for modeling, developing, and testing the tools and critical flight software systems that enable autonomous deliveries and rapid product iteration. The team focuses on developing novel solutions to ensure delivery platforms can function in a wide range of increasingly challenging conditions, with fundamental physics-based analysis being central to continued success. In this role, the Senior Controls Engineer will use a range of analysis techniques to understand system performance and how it is affected by design choices, limitations, and requirements. They will proactively collaborate across teams to drive product improvements, using data from flight testing and the global fleet of customer aircraft to improve simulations and develop tools for new insights. Success in this role directly leads to improved operational capability of Zipline's logistics network.

Requirements

Minimum of 4+ years of industry experience designing control, estimation algorithms and implementing them into embedded systems with the help of simulation tools to analyze performance
Professional experience in one or more of the following areas: flight dynamics and control, dynamic modeling of complex physical systems, model identification, statistical analysis. Ideally you will have used your skills in these areas to successfully ship one or more complex products.
Demonstrate enthusiasm and proficiency in both simulation practices and hands-on work with hardware, spanning from bench-level experimentation to comprehensive flight tests.
Software skills in both technical computing (MATLAB, SciPi, Julia, etc) and embedded software (Rust, C, C++), with experience working in a large, complex, multi-developer environment.

Responsibilities

Develop dynamic models of complex systems and components that are core to our high fidelity 6DOF simulation.
Analyze and improve the performance of existing and future vehicle designs through a combination of simulation and flight tests.
Play a key role in deriving and verifying requirements for both hardware components and software interfaces, while balancing the technical need and broader product prerequisites as well as safety and regulatory standards.
Identify and develop processes and tools to improve efficiency and protect against regressions.
Design and implement onboard integrity tests to monitor how well the vehicle is flying and aid in understanding off-nominal performance and delivery failures, both in research and validation flights, as well as in the production fleet.
Work in a high performing team, sharing your experience and improving efficiency while developing the next generation of logistics.