About the role
About Zipline
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.
What You'll Do
Motor & Propulsion Characterization
- Conduct full electromechanical characterization of BLDC motors including loss characterization, thermal coefficient extration, and demagnetization testing
- Evaluate propulsion systems (motor + inverter + propeller) for thrust, efficiency, and thermal behavior across the full operational envelope
- Test servo and motor-based actuators for positional accuracy, losses, holding torque, and closed-loop dynamic response
- Perform root cause analysis on field failures and correlate back to test data to close the loop between lab and flight
- Own the full performance and reliability test campaign for your hardware - you are the go-to person to understand how a part will perform in the field, and when the hardware is pushed to its limits.
- Develop structural tests
- Characterize wear-out mechanisms for complex actuator and propeller subassemblies, subject to billions of damage cycles per lifetime.
- Develop novel ways for validating motor and structural models, including validating FEA
Test Development & Infrastructure
- Design, build, and maintain dynamometer and higher-level propulsion thrust stands for motor testing.
- Develop high-throughput dynamometers for production-line testing.
- Develop automated test scripts and data acquisition pipelines (Python, or equivalent)
- Define and own test specifications covering efficiency maps, thermal performance, torque-speed curves, cogging, back-EMF, and endurance
Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Lead the development of new hardware and concepts, with a test-first approach.
- Partner with mechanical, electrical, and firmware engineers to translate design intent into rigorous test requirements
- Work with manufacturing to develop production test strategies that balance coverage, throughput, and cost
- Communicate findings, risks, and recommendations clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Drive design-for-test requirements early in the development cycle to ensure testability is built into the hardware
What Else You Need to Know
Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, mental or physical disability, medical condition, genetic information, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, military or veteran status, citizenship, or other characteristics protected by state, federal or local law or our other policies.
We value diversity at Zipline and welcome applications from those who are traditionally underrepresented in tech. If you like the sound of this position but are not sure if you are the perfect fit, please apply!
