Systems Engineer

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

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 millions of deliveries across four continents. Zipline's system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and gives people time back, with over 140 million commercial autonomous miles safely flown. They seek practical problem solvers motivated by building systems with meaningful impact and scaling the future of logistics. The company is looking for a Senior Systems Engineer to join their team, someone who has developed, tested, and deployed complex electromechanical systems into safety-critical environments. This role involves tackling cross-disciplinary parts of complex programs, solving business-critical problems with high ownership, and driving the company to scale operations and production, improve reliability, enhance customer experience, and mature processes. Zipline was founded by engineers dedicated to making the world a better place, and this role offers the opportunity to level up Systems Engineering and contribute to saving lives.

Requirements

BS and/or MS in Aerospace Engineering, Systems Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering or related field
5+ years of real-world experience in safety critical electromechanical systems, for example in autonomous vehicles, aerospace, or industrial automation fields including systems/vehicle design experience
Ability to solve complex multidisciplinary problems on schedule independently
The ability to dive in when appropriate to solve problems using tools such as your modeling language/tool of choice, systems modeling, and statistical analysis among others
Knowledge from designing systems that were resilient to harsh climatic environments, mechanical vibration, ESD, and/or high electrical noise
Experience with not only fail-safe fault tolerant modes but also fail-operative modes that enable the system to continue to operate through faults

Nice To Haves

A proven track record setting up systems engineering processes in new projects and/or startup environments such as implementing requirements including processes, definition, decomposition, and verification
Sufficiently comfortable with energy budgets, flight dynamics, and statistical analysis methods to set the appropriate risk-based thresholds for things like energy margins and environmental limitations
Leadership skills to grow and develop a world class systems engineering team

Responsibilities

Serve as a trusted technical expert of deploying high-reliability, autonomous systems into safety-critical environments including owning requirements, metrics, test coverage, and validation processes to ensure we ship safe and robust systems
Own system and subsystem requirement definition, decomposition, and traceability
Define interfaces and drive cross disciplinary discussions to align on budgets
Develop frameworks and facilitate trade studies to optimize for performance, safety, and cost across key system architecture or operations decisions
Evaluate hardware and software release standards and test requirements
Partner with design engineering, other systems engineers and certification team to prove flight worthiness to regulators