Senior Electrical Engineer - Powertrain

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

11h•Onsite

About The Position

Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service, on a mission 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, making millions of deliveries across four continents. Their system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and gives people time back, with over 140 million commercial autonomous miles safely flown. Zipline is looking for practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth, motivated by building systems that have a direct, meaningful impact on people’s lives and scaling the future of logistics. The Senior Electrical Engineer will develop power electronics focused avionics for Zipline's next generation aircraft. This role involves architecting and designing electronics such as motor inverters, power distribution, battery management, fail-safe/safety, and communication and networking systems, which are crucial for expanding Zipline's impact globally. The Powertrain team designs robust systems for life-saving service in harsh environments, focusing on system architecture, performance, reliability, fault tolerance, mass, and cost, including FAA-approved safety systems. They also build custom solutions with high performance embedded computing and high speed serial buses, ensuring designs are robust to broad ambient temperature ranges, challenging waterproofing/ingress constraints, and maintain immunity to RF and ESD threats.

Requirements

A degree in Electrical Engineering, Embedded Hardware Engineering or equivalent practical experience.
Minimum 5 years of design experience including: circuit analysis, schematic capture, PCB layout, packaging, and integration.
Past success developing electronics for critical systems in fields such as aerospace, transportation, or medical devices.
Experience with at least some of these desired: Hard-switching power converters; Resonant power converters; Motor drives; Voltage, current, and temperature sensing analog front ends; Simple digital logic; Basic embedded communications busses (e.g. SPI, I2C, UART, CAN); Higher speed communications (e.g. Ethernet, LVDS).
Enthusiasm for working in a fast-paced, collaborative, cross-functional environment.
Clear communication skills and the ability to explain technical challenges to both fellow engineers and non-engineers alike.

Nice To Haves

Experience with practical aspects of carrying a design into mass production. This includes optimizing for cost, manufacturability, and yields.

Responsibilities

Engineer avionics for volume production through a full design cycle including requirements, prototype, schematic capture, layout, and validation.
Shape the architecture of Zipline’s next generation product, making impactful design decisions daily, while working with a high level of independence.
Lead trade studies, understand competing design priorities, and provide direction and clarity for burning down risk.
Proactively seek out opportunities for improvement in system, vehicle, and component level design.
Collaborate cross-functionally in all stages of development, including: Architecture: fault tolerance, power, mass, thermals; Detailed Design: schematic capture, PCB layout, system integration, validation; Production: quality, failure analysis, manufacturing, cost; Deployment: troubleshoot field issues, develop rapid mitigations, roll learnings into future design revisions.