Sr/Staff System Test and Validation Engineer

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

About The Position

Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service, focused on serving all humans equally by ensuring access to essential goods. They design, build, and operate an autonomous logistics system, making deliveries globally. The company operates on four continents, with a delivery occurring every 30 seconds and millions of deliveries completed to date. Zipline's system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and provides fast delivery. With over 140 million commercial autonomous miles safely flown, Zipline is redefining access to healthcare, consumer products, and food worldwide. The company seeks practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth, motivated by building systems with a meaningful impact and scaling the future of logistics. They value individuals who sculpt from first principles, enjoy facing adversity, and can achieve the impossible at record speeds. The System Test team is a fast-paced group responsible for evaluating new hardware and conducting environmental and durability campaigns for Zipline's major hardware categories. This role involves being a technical leader within a small, specialized team of test engineers and technicians. The position requires owning the system-test roadmap for reliability validation and rapid fault finding, and developing hardware and software to replicate in-flight stresses and monitor the vehicle. The algorithms developed for failure detection may also be deployed to the fleet for monitoring. This team's ability to quickly discover hardware faults is crucial for Zipline's success and the velocity of hardware development and deployment.

Requirements

Demonstrated experience leading test engineers, equipment designers, and technicians for complex hardware programs.
Experience planning and running environmental, durability, and reliability test campaigns that inform engineering decisions.
Experience in reliability techniques including MTBF, Weibull analyses, and DFMEAs.
Strong electromechanical skills in embedded controls, real-time compute, and actuation.
Software proficiency (Python, Rust, C/C++)
Electrical engineering fundamentals including battery systems, communications protocols, and RF systems.
Strong hardware-debugging intuition and electrical troubleshooting skills for aircraft or similarly complex electromechanical systems.
Sound judgment to prioritize test capability, campaign scope, and fault investigations across multiple hardware programs.
Excellent ability to ‘get unstuck’ and make progress in a complex and changing environment.
Experience developing real-time controls in safety critical applications.

Responsibilities

Develop novel ways of replicating in-flight environments on the ground, including external factors (dust, ingress, icing), and internal vehicle stresses.
Deeply understand the vehicle DFMEA and own the vehicle actuation during system test.
Translate mission profiles into qualification and life-test plans, including accelerated test design, stress levels, and sample size justification. Stay ahead of aircraft profiles and load curves, to help unlock new capability.
Develop health monitoring and anomaly detection software (Python, Rust) for aircraft and robotic systems, with emphasis on using the vehicle’s on-board telemetry.
Drive the ‘rapid failure finding’ branch of the system test campaigns, a core input to design cycles and achieving maintenance goals.
Build data pipelines and automated analysis tooling to adapt flight-software validators for system tests.
Drive or develop directly the features needed in flight code to enable ‘Test Mode’ functionality.
Integrate off-board sensors (cameras, airspeed sensors, other instrumentation) for continuous monitoring of vehicle health and tester health during long-duration tests.
Conduct characterization of test assets, including developing analytical models and running instrumented test campaigns, to correlate test conditions to flight.
Drive decisions about test strategy overall: what new features are needed in system test, what should be tested at the system-level vs. component level vs. flight test. How to bring more coverage into system tests, and ways of rapid failure-finding.
Collaborate with the Reliability team to hone the strategy of long-duration vs. multiple vehicles being tested, as a function of the part-to-part variability and overall CapEx strategy.