Senior Mechanical Design Engineer - Towers

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

5h•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, delivering critical supplies quickly and reliably. Zipline operates on four continents, makes a delivery every 30 seconds, and has completed millions of deliveries including blood, vaccines, medical supplies, food, and retail products. Their customers include prominent healthcare systems, governments, retailers, restaurants, and global businesses. The drone is only 15% of their system, which strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and gives people time back, with over 140 million commercial autonomous miles safely flown. Zipline seeks practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth, motivated by building systems with direct, meaningful impact on people’s lives and scaling the future of logistics. The Ground Systems team is responsible for all ground hardware enabling Zips to take off, fly, land, and prepare for missions. They are developing a ubiquitous infrastructure solution for drone-based logistics, aiming for elegant, modular, cost-effective, and adaptable integration solutions for new and existing building structures worldwide. This team designs large steel towers that hold their docks, providing structural support and including mechanisms, actuators, and harnessing for charging infrastructure and data transmission.

Requirements

Proven track record owning complex subassemblies or full systems over at least 3 product programs (concept, prototype, validation, production).
Strong fundamentals: load estimation, classic mechanics, structural hand calcs to guide part sizing, FEA and clean CAD designs.
Excellent problem solving - tenacious and scientific in approach while able to quickly explain concepts to others.
Familiarity with mechanism design and the integration of electrical components into hardware products.
Practical knowledge of manufacturing methods such as welding, sheetmetal forming, extrusion, CNC machining, etc.
Experience partnering with contract manufacturers to ramp up production of high volume lines.
Demonstrated CAD fluency for system level ownership - 3D/2D of 20-50 parts simultaneously.
Disciplined processes: Your parts are released, BOMs are maintained, SOPs created for builds, and timelines are up-to-date.
True expertise in one area that will level up the team.
Excellent communication - written, verbal, and visual, tailored to the audience with the right level of technical depth.
Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering.
Ability to periodically (<10%) travel to visit customers and suppliers.
Must be eligible to work in the US and willing to relocate to Bay Area CA region.

Nice To Haves

NX is your primary CAD tool.
Knowledge in applying appropriate FOS and margin to human safety critical application (design margin tables, structural joint calculations).
Hands-on welding experience for prototyping.

Responsibilities

Use engineering fundamentals to develop innovative products for ground systems infrastructure, centered around welded steel towers.
Leverage experiences, knowledge, and first principles thinking towards problem solving to create an optimal product.
Engineer systems that will only come together days before they are needed, ensuring they work the first time.
Solve complex problems with little direction and maximum autonomy.
Use hand calcs to guide thinking and designs and quickly bound a problem.
Own the design of the entire system and subassemblies for the next generation of towers.
Design structural components, mechanisms, and electronics integration.
Make important decisions about the product architecture.
Create designs that will enable practical scale on a short timeline that will meet high product reliability targets.
Quickly iterate and downselect based on data from analysis and test results from prototypes.
Collaborate cross functionally with electrical, software, civil, NPI and supply chain teams to bring designs to production and into the field.