Senior Electrical Engineer

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

12h•$150,000 - $215,000•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 deliveries every 30 seconds across four continents, with millions of deliveries completed. Their system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and provides time back, having safely flown over 140 million commercial autonomous miles. Zipline seeks practical problem solvers motivated by building systems with direct, meaningful impact and scaling the future of logistics. The Senior Electrical Engineer will develop power electronics-focused avionics for Zipline's next-generation aircraft. This role, within the Powertrain team, involves architecting and designing electronics such as motor inverters, power distribution, battery management, fail-safe/safety, and communication/networking systems. These components are crucial for expanding Zipline's impact globally. The Powertrain team addresses challenges in designing robust systems for harsh environments, focusing on performance, reliability, fault tolerance, mass, and cost, including FAA-approved safety systems. They build custom solutions with high-performance embedded computing and high-speed serial buses, ensuring designs are robust to broad ambient temperature ranges, waterproofing/ingress constraints, and 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 hard-switching power converters.
Experience with resonant power converters.
Experience with motor drives.
Experience with voltage, current, and temperature sensing analog front ends.
Experience with simple digital logic.
Experience with basic embedded communications busses (e.g. SPI, I2C, UART, CAN).
Experience with 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.
Must be eligible to work in the US.
Must be able to work at Zipline’s South San Francisco office.

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.