Senior GNC Engineer

ZipLine•South San Francisco, CA

62d•$170,000 - $210,000

About The Position

Zipline's GNC team is at the heart of our product's success. Our team is responsible for modeling, developing, and testing the tools and critical flight software systems that enable our aircraft to complete missions autonomously and that enable Zipline to rapidly iterate and improve our products. We thrive on developing novel solutions to ensure our delivery platforms can function in a wide range of increasingly challenging conditions, ensuring that we serve everyone in the world equally. From pushing the limits of the hardware to informing changes to improve resilience and manufacturing; GNC analysis is central to our continued success. In this role you'll use a range of analysis techniques to understand our system performance and how it is affected by design choices, limitations and requirements, as well as proactively collaborating across teams to drive improvements to our products. Working with the wider team, you'll use data from flight testing and our global fleet of customer aircraft to improve simulations and develop tools to continually find new insights that will improve our products. By staying close to our customers, you'll learn what really works and where we should be spending our time to drive our next phase of growth. Success in this role leads directly to improved operational capability of our logistics network.

Requirements

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 aircraft is flying and aid in understanding off-nominal performance and flight 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.