Senior Hardware Reliability Engineer - Design for Reliability

Zipline • South San Francisco, CA

75d • $150,000 - $215,000

About The Position

As a Design for Reliability Engineer at Zipline, you will be responsible for defining and delivering the Safety and Reliability attribute of our latest drone-delivery systems. You’ll combine deep knowledge of failure phenomena in electromechanical devices, hands-on experimentation, and statistical modeling to ensure Zipline’s latest drone-delivery platforms survive the most demanding environments on Earth. Your work will span from early architecture decisions, like where to apply redundancy, fail-operational strategies, and fault tolerance through the definition of accelerated tests, coding reliability models, and verification methods. You’ll uncover risks early, provide data to risk-based decisions, and guide design teams with clear, actionable recommendations. In doing so, you’ll directly shape the long-term reliability and safety of Zipline’s autonomous aircraft.

Requirements

• BS/MS/PhD in Mechanical, Electrical, Materials Science, or related field, with 5+ years of experience in design, reliability, or validation engineering.
• Deep knowledge of the mechanisms of failure and how to prevent them through robust design.
• Practical experience designing and executing correlated lifetime testing: corrosion, heat, humidity, thermal cycling, and vibration testing.
• Proficiency in reliability statistics and modeling: (Weibull/survival analysis, DOE, FMEA, FTA, and reliability growth analysis).
• Skilled in data analysis and scripting tools to analyze large vast datasets and forecast outcomes (Python, Reliasoft, Minitab, JMP, or MATLAB).

Nice To Haves

• Proven experience scaling complex safety-critical systems operating in harsh environments.
• Strong communication and leadership skills with a track record of influencing design, manufacturing, and operational decisions across mechanical, electrical, and software disciplines.
• Ability to partner with suppliers to ensure reliability requirements are understood, tested, and met.
• A proactive, systems-level mindset that drives issues to resolution and builds organizational reliability culture.

Responsibilities

• Define Quantitative Reliability Requirements
• Translate system-level targets (availability, cost-per-delivery) into measurable reliability specs and operating stress profiles that can be tested.
• Mitigate Program, Operational, and Safety Risks
• Lead DFMEA to identify failure modes early; apply analytical FTA to influence architecture for redundancy, fault tolerance, and fail-operational behavior.
• Use HALT, DOE, and rapid A/B testing to uncover design weaknesses and improve robustness, manufacturability, and maintainability.
• Predict Reliability Performance
• Develop accelerated life tests using applied physics-of-failure to potential design risks using real-world data to forecast lifetime reliability and safety margins.
• Apply Bayesian statistics (survival analysis, Weibull analysis) to service and connected fleet data in order to predict failure rates as a function of time.
• Demonstrate and Verify Reliability
• Author Design Verification Test plans, define acceptance criteria, and specific test parameters necessary to prove reliability requirements are met.
• Evaluate changes from previous testing, and where necessary, define revalidation and program release gates across iterative design cycles to ensure consistent reliability performance.

Benefits

• Equity compensation
• Discretionary annual or performance bonuses
• Sales incentives
• Medical, dental and vision insurance
• Paid time off

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Master's degree
• Number of Employees: 1,001-5,000 employees