Senior Dyno 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 looking for a Senior Motor Dyno Engineer to design, build, commission, and own electric-motor dynamometer systems used across motor development, supplier quality, and reliability validation.

In this role, you will develop dynos with distinct technical objectives. Characterization dynos will use high-accuracy instrumentation to generate trusted motor-performance data and correlate electromagnetic, thermal, and system models. Inspection dynos will provide robust, repeatable measurements that can be deployed at motor suppliers to assess outgoing quality. Durability dynos will reproduce application-representative mechanical, electrical, and thermal loads to quantify motor life and identify failure mechanisms.

You will be responsible for the complete test-system lifecycle, from defining requirements and selecting hardware through mechanical and electrical integration, CAD ownership, controls development, data acquisition, safety systems, commissioning, and sustained operation. You will work closely with motor design, reliability, power electronics, controls, mechanical, thermal, systems, manufacturing, and supplier-quality engineers.

The ideal candidate combines hands-on electromechanical integration experience with strong test engineering fundamentals, software capability, and the judgment required to create test systems that are accurate, reliable, safe, and easy to operate.

What You’ll Do

• Define requirements and architectures for motor characterization, inspection, and durability dynamometers.

• Design, build, commission, and maintain dyno systems for propulsion and auxiliary motors.

• Select and integrate motors, load machines, inverters, torque transducers, speed sensors, power analyzers, thermal instrumentation, cooling systems, fixtures, and data-acquisition hardware.

• Develop mechanical interfaces, shafting, couplings, guarding, alignment strategies, and structural systems for safe and accurate testing.

• Design electro-mechanical systems including low-voltage power distribution, grounding, shielding, interlocks, emergency stops, and fault protection.

• Develop automated test sequences, supervisory controls, data acquisition, and post-processing tools using Python and related software platforms.

• Establish a common user interface and software architecture across Zipline’s motor-dyno ecosystem, including standardized data access, test-profile programming, reusable test-profile libraries, and common workflows across new and existing dynos.

• Build shared tools that allow engineers to discover, configure, execute, and analyze dyno tests consistently without requiring dyno-specific knowledge or bespoke workflows.

• Generate motor maps and test datasets used to validate electromagnetic, thermal, controls, and system-level models.

• Develop supplier-deployable inspection dynos with repeatable test procedures, clear pass/fail metrics, and appropriate measurement controls.

• Design and build test systems that reproduce application-representative torque, speed, electrical, thermal, vibration, and transient-load profiles.

• Develop operating procedures, maintenance plans, commissioning documentation, and safety reviews.

• Improve dyno utilization, test throughput, data quality, and operational reliability through automation and standardization.

• Provide technical guidance to international/domestic suppliers, other engineers, and technicians as well as serve as a subject-matter expert for electric-motor testing.

What You’ll Bring

• Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, mechatronics, controls engineering, or a related field.

• Experience designing, commissioning, or operating electric-motor, powertrain, or rotating-equipment dynamometers.

• Demonstrated ownership of complex test systems from initial requirements through hardware bring-up and sustained operation.

• Strong electromechanical integration skills across mechanical hardware, electrical systems, instrumentation, controls, and software.

• Experience selecting and integrating torque transducers, encoders, power analyzers, thermocouples, RTDs, vibration sensors, and data-acquisition systems.

• Proficiency in Python for test automation, instrument control, data processing, analysis, and visualization.

• Experience with industrial communication protocols and instrument interfaces such

Similar jobs

• Senior Power and Performance Engineer — NVIDIA · Santa Clara, CA
• Senior Performance Engineer — Ellipsislabs · New York, New York
• Senior Performance Engineer — Aes · All Islands, Hawaii, United States | CA, San Francisco | UT, Salt Lake City
• Senior Performance Engineer — Crusoe · San Francisco, CA - US
• Senior Power Engineer — Vast · Long Beach, California, United States
• Senior Dynamics Engineer — K2spacecorporation · Los Angeles, CA
• Senior PDK Engineer — NVIDIA · Santa Clara, CA
• Senior Production Engineer — Lightspark · Los Angeles HQ