Senior Mechanical Engineer, Long Range

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

1d•$145,000 - $220,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service. We are on a mission to serve all humans equally by ensuring access to food, medicine and essential goods anytime, anywhere. We design, build, and operate the world’s largest autonomous logistics system, delivering critical supplies quickly and reliably. Today, Zipline operates on four continents, makes a delivery somewhere in the world every 30 seconds, and has completed millions of deliveries to date, including blood, vaccines, medical supplies, food, and retail products. Our customers include the world’s largest and most prominent healthcare systems, governments, retailers, restaurants and global businesses who rely on us to save lives, reduce emissions, increase economic opportunity, and provide delivery from point A to point B as fast as possible. The drone is only 15% of what we’ve built to enable seamless, reliable, global operations. Our system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and gives people time back. With more than 140 million commercial autonomous miles safely flown, Zipline is redefining access to healthcare, consumer products, and food across the globe. We operate at a global scale and are looking for practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth. Our team is motivated by building systems that have a direct, meaningful impact on people’s lives and by scaling the future of logistics. We are seeking people who sculpt from first principles, enjoy facing adversity, and can do the impossible at record breaking speeds. You are an owner-oriented Mechanical Engineer joining Zipline’s Long Range Platform team to design, validate, and deliver critical airframe and electromechanical hardware used in long-distance autonomous delivery aircraft. This role sits at the intersection of field logistics, fleet operations, and mass production: your work will reduce aircraft weight, increase structural and mechanism reliability in harsh field conditions, and enable higher sortie rates for customers who depend on predictable, high-uptime deliveries. You will operate with end-to-end hardware responsibility—from requirement definition and architecture trade-offs through prototype validation, supplier integration, production ramp, and in-field sustainment—and you will make decisions that directly affect fleet availability, safety margins, and cost-per-delivery.

Requirements

4+ years industry experience designing electromechanical and structural assemblies; demonstrable ownership of complex subassemblies through full product cycles (design → qualification → production ramp).
Deep CAD fluency (managing 20–30 part subassemblies and top-level integration), rigorous GD&T skills, and experience producing manufacturing-ready drawings and inspection criteria.
Proven track record applying FEA, hand calculations (beam, buckling, bolted joints), tolerance analysis, and test correlation to establish safety and reliability margins for flight or field-critical hardware.
Hands-on prototyping and test experience: you build fixtures, run validation campaigns, and close design loops from test data to production intent.
Direct supplier engagement experience: negotiating DFM changes, resolving quality issues, and translating supplier capabilities into producible designs.
Experience with structural components, mechanisms, fastener systems, composites or metallic airframe-scale assemblies, and designing for serviceability in field conditions.
Willingness and ability to travel to suppliers, production sites, and field depots on an as-needed basis (periodic domestic and occasional international travel).
Strong bias for taking end-to-end ownership: you will stay with issues until verified fixes are in production and fielded.

Nice To Haves

Aerospace or automotive validation experience, composites design, high-efficiency electric powertrain exposure, NX proficiency, and prior experience scaling prototypes to injection molding, stamping, or extrusion processes.

Responsibilities

Own specific Long Range mechanical subsystems (e.g., wing/fuselage primary structure, deployable delivery mechanism, landing gear and attach fittings, or integrated payload-mount assemblies) and be the primary technical lead from concept to sustained production.
Translate operational and fleet requirements (range, payload, sortie cadence, field-maintainability, service intervals, and environmental exposure) into quantitative mechanical performance targets and design architectures.
Produce and iterate detailed CAD models, tolerance stacks, GD&T, and manufacturing drawings enabling supplier quotes, DFx reviews, and inspection plans for volume production.
Run first-principles analysis and engineering simulation (FEA, buckling, fatigue, jointed-assembly loads) and validate with bench tests and flight-representative test rigs; close the loop between analysis and measured performance.
Prototype rapidly, lead hands-on build-test-iterate campaigns, and produce test plans that deliver go/no-go metrics (fatigue cycles, damage tolerance thresholds, mean-time-between-failure targets) tied to release criteria and field reliability goals.
Define and own verification matrices, failure modes & effects for assigned assemblies, and corrective actions through qualification and production ramp; drive root-cause investigations and implement design fixes with clear timelines and acceptance criteria.
Partner daily with Electrical, Software, Integration/Test, Manufacturing Engineering, Supply Chain, and Operations to resolve cross-functional tradeoffs, supplier nonconformances, and production issues; act as the escalation owner for mechanical issues impacting fleet operations.
Support field deployments and production startups as required (on-site presence during launches, supplier plant visits, or depot troubleshooting) and ensure handoff documentation, service procedures, and spares strategies are in place.