Head of Flight Test Engineering

About this 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.

About You and The Role

Zipline builds autonomous delivery systems that move critical goods through real-world logistics networks. Flight test provides the evidence that aircraft, software, delivery operations, docking and charging systems, and fleet capabilities are ready for commercial operations.

As Head of Flight Test Engineering, you will lead the team that converts complex engineering questions into safe, representative release evidence. You will own flight test strategy and campaigns while strengthening the automation, data, and operating practices that help Zipline learn quickly and make rigorous release decisions.

You are both a strong technical leader and a hands-on systems thinker. You should be excited to lead and grow a team while diving into test architecture, data, automation, risk assessment, and execution details. You should bring strong judgment about when to move quickly, when to invest in durable infrastructure and process, and how to balance engineering rigor with the pace required to support a rapidly evolving autonomous delivery system.

What You'll Do

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• Lead, grow, and develop the Flight Test Engineering team. • Own the validation strategy for new aircraft capabilities, software releases, hardware changes, delivery operations, docking and charging systems, fleet behavior, and operational concepts. • Define campaign objectives, success criteria, risk posture, and go/no-go frameworks with Software, Electrical, Mechanical, Controls, Autonomy, Cloud, Systems, Product, and Regulatory teams. • Build and oversee flight test campaigns that produce clear release-readiness evidence and expand representative regression coverage across the end-to-end logistics system. • Improve automated test infrastructure, data pipelines, anomaly detection, reporting, and correctness metrics to increase repeatability, test velocity, test capacity, and decision quality. • Choose the appropriate validation modality—flight, simulation, software-in-the-loop, hardware-in-the-loop, or ground testing—to focus flight testing on the highest-value learning. • Partner with Flight Test Operations on site readiness, execution processes, operational scalability, and support for testing in new geographies and environments. • Foster a strong safety culture across Flight Test Engineering and Operations, ensuring compliance with regulations and internal standards.

What You'll Bring

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• 5+ years designing, developing, validating, or testing complex autonomous, robotic, aerospace, aviation, or safety-critical systems; UAS experience is strongly preferred. • Experience leading flight test, system test, validation, or field test engineering teams while staying technically engaged. • Experience taking complex test campaigns from objective definition through planning, execution, analysis, and release recommendation. • Systems-level judgment across software, embedded, electrical, mechanical, controls, operations, and regulatory constraints. • Experience building or integrating test automation, analytics tooling, data pipelines, or scalable validation systems that improve coverage and efficiency. • Ability to lead cross-functional technical programs and communicate safety, risk, and engineering tradeoffs to engineers, operators, executives, and regulatory partners. • Comfort working in field environments with operational teams and willingness to travel domestically and internationally for flight testing, team leadership, and test-site support.

What Else You Need To Know

The starting cash range for this role is $200,000-$260,000. Please note th

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