Systems Risk & Safety 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, delivering critical supplies quickly and reliably across four continents, completing millions of deliveries including blood, vaccines, medical supplies, food, and retail products. Zipline's system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and gives people time back, having safely flown over 140 million commercial autonomous miles. The company seeks practical problem solvers motivated by building systems with meaningful impact and scaling the future of logistics. The System Risk & Safety Engineer will own and evolve the end-to-end risk and safety strategy for Zipline’s aircraft and operations. This is a senior technical leadership role with authority to define acceptable safety, ensure operational scale, and act as a steward of safety across engineering, operations, and the company. The role requires first-principles thinking, quantitative risk ownership, and judgment to make difficult safety and risk decisions, focusing on the quantitative safety case, driving top-down safety analyses, and ensuring continuous learning from operations feeds into engineering priorities.

Requirements

BS and/or MS in Aerospace Engineering, Systems Engineering, or a related field
6+ years of experience delivering safety‑critical electromechanical systems into real‑world operation
Demonstrated ownership of system‑level safety analysis and decision‑making
Strong first‑principles reasoning in the absence of complete regulations or industry guidance
Experience with hazard analysis techniques such as fault trees, FMEA, and risk modeling
Comfort engaging deeply with data, models, and operational evidence when needed

Nice To Haves

Experience working at the intersection of engineering design and live operations
Exposure to regulator‑facing safety cases or certification efforts
Experience scaling cross-functional Safety Management Systems

Responsibilities

Own the quantitative safety case, including decomposition of top-level safety objectives into system requirements, allocations, and operational limitations
Own top-down fault tree analysis for safety-related events and hazards, including budget allocation and margin tracking
Ensure safety analyses remain valid as designs, operations, and scale evolve by monitoring current and emerging risks
Ensure Zipline learns everything possible from test and commercial events, pulling corrective and preventive actions into engineering and operational priorities
Act as the technical owner for external safety communication, in partnership with certification, legal, and communications teams
Proactively establish Zipline as an industry leader in safety transparency and trust
Provide clear, technically grounded support for reactive communications in response to incidents