Senior Antenna Design Engineer

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 is seeking a Senior Antenna Design Engineer to lead the design, integration, and validation of antenna systems for our autonomous aircraft, ground infrastructure, and supporting products.

You will own antenna performance from early architecture and simulation through hardware integration, regulatory certification, manufacturing, and field deployment. You will work on electrically and mechanically constrained platforms where antenna performance must be balanced against aerodynamics, structural requirements, thermal constraints, industrial design, reliability, cost, and manufacturability.

This role requires strong electromagnetic fundamentals, practical antenna development experience, and the ability to turn ambiguous system requirements into robust production hardware. You will collaborate closely with RF, electrical, mechanical, embedded, systems, flight test, manufacturing, reliability, and regulatory teams.

What You'll Do

• Own antenna architecture, design, simulation, prototyping, integration, and validation for airborne and ground-based products.

• Develop antennas and RF structures across technologies such as cellular, GNSS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ISM, telemetry, ADSB, UAT, command-and-control, and other licensed or unlicensed bands.

• Translate communication, navigation, regulatory, and system-level requirements into antenna specifications and verification plans.

• Perform electromagnetic simulations using tools such as Ansys HFSS, CST Studio Suite, Altair FEKO, or equivalent platforms.

• Optimize antenna performance within tightly constrained mechanical environments containing batteries, motors, composites, metals, cables, electronics, and other RF-sensitive structures.

• Conduct antenna measurements, including return loss, impedance, isolation, efficiency, gain, radiation patterns, polarization, and total radiated performance.

• Plan and execute testing in anechoic chambers, outdoor antenna ranges, laboratory environments, and representative operational configurations.

• Characterize antenna performance at the subsystem and complete-vehicle levels, including installed performance and platform-induced effects.

• Develop antenna diversity, MIMO, isolation, coexistence, and placement strategies for systems containing multiple radios.

• Work on antenna arrays, distributed antenna systems, single aperture antennas as well as co-located antenna integrations to deliver on radiated performance, and support cross functionally to deliver: coexistence, desense, regulatory and product level requirements.

• Deliver antenna integration with additional follow through with specific attention to detail to harness integration, serviceability, matching networks, aperture matching, connector strategy and PCB integration.

• Evaluate link performance and collaborate with RF systems engineers on link budgets, propagation assumptions, interference risks, and coverage requirements.

• Investigate RF performance issues using simulation, laboratory measurements, flight-test data, and structured root-cause analysis.

• Design repeatable RF test methods and fixtures for engineering validation, production testing, and supplier qualification.

• Design and implement unique antenna systems and RF harnessing solutions with multi physics demands across thermal, shock, vibe, humidity, mass, and life limits.

• Partner with mechanical and industrial design teams to develop antenna solutions that meet aerodynamic, environmental, structural, and packaging requirements.

• Work with manufacturing and suppliers to establish antenna specifications, tolerances, inspection criteria, calibration methods, and production controls.

• Support regulatory and carrier certification activities, including FCC, CE, ISED, cellular carrier, SAR, spurious-emissions, and other applicable testing.

• Perform technical reviews, communicate design tradeoffs, and document decisions, risks, test results, and lessons learned.

• Mentor other engineers and help establish antenna-development tools, processes, standards, and technical roadmaps for the RF organization.

What You'll Bring

• Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, applied physics, electromagnetics, or a related technical field.

• Typically 7 or more years of professional experience developing antennas or closely related RF hardware for production systems.

• Strong under

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