Senior Electromagnetic 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 the Role

Zipline is looking for a Motor Electromagnetic Engineer to develop and own the analytical and numerical modeling and validation capabilities used to design, select, and optimize electric machines across our aircraft platforms.

In this role, you will build a common motor-modeling framework that enables engineers to rapidly explore design spaces, understand performance tradeoffs, and optimize motors as part of the complete aircraft system. You will create and maintain electromagnetic models, performance maps, loss models, and scalable design-space datasets that support motor development from early architecture studies through detailed design and flight validation.

You will work closely with mechanical, thermal, power electronics, controls, aerodynamics, systems, and vehicle-performance engineers. Rather than optimizing a motor in isolation, you will evaluate how motor characteristics affect aircraft-level outcomes such as range, payload, acoustic performance, thermal margin, reliability, mass, and cost.

This is a highly cross-functional role with broad technical ownership. The ideal candidate combines strong electric-machine fundamentals with practical modeling judgment and an ability to turn complex simulation results into clear engineering decisions.

What You’ll Do

• Develop, validate, and maintain electromagnetic models for Zipline’s propulsion and auxiliary motors.

• Build a reusable and well-governed library of motor models, assumptions, material data, winding definitions, simulation results, and validation evidence.

• Generate torque-speed envelopes, efficiency maps, loss breakdowns, voltage and current requirements, flux-linkage and inductance maps, demagnetization limits, and fault-performance data.

• Create scalable design-space “clouds” and perform sensitivity and uncertainty studies across geometry, materials, windings, temperature, tolerances, and operating conditions.

• Develop reduced-order and surrogate models for aircraft optimization, mission simulation, controls development, and thermal analysis.

• Integrate motor models with inverter, battery, propeller or driven-load, thermal, and aircraft mission models.

• Evaluate motor architectures, electromagnetic materials, supplier concepts, and emerging technologies using first-principles analysis, simulation, and test data.

• Optimize designs for efficiency, mass, torque density, thermal performance, acoustic behavior, controllability, reliability, and cost.

• Develop model-validation plans that define test objectives, operating points, required measurements, instrumentation accuracy, acceptance criteria, and correlation metrics.

• Plan and execute dynamometer experiments to characterize motor performance and validate electromagnetic, loss, and thermal models across relevant operating conditions.

• Analyze measurement uncertainty, test repeatability, and sources of discrepancy between simulation and experiment, and use those findings to improve model assumptions and fidelity.

• Work closely with test engineers to develop instrumentation and test methods that produce the high-quality data required for model correlation and validation.

• Use dynamometer, component, and aircraft test data to calibrate models where appropriate and independently validate their predictive accuracy.

What You’ll Bring

• Master’s degree or PhD in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, applied physics, or a related field, with a focus on electric machines, electromagnetics, optimization, or electric powertrains.

• Strong understanding of electric-machine fundamentals, including magnetic circuits, winding theory, d-q models, saturation, harmonics, losses, thermal effects, and permanent-magnet behavior.

• Significant experience developing and interpreting finite-element and reduced-order models of electric machines.

• Experience with Motor-CAD or similar software (JMAG, Maxwell, COMSOL, etc) for electromagnetic, thermal, and performance modeling of electric machines.

• Strong proficiency in MATLAB for model development, automation, optimization, data analysis, and visualization.

• Experience generating motor maps or reduced-order models for system simulation, controls, or powertrain optimization.

• Hands-on experience planning and executing electric-motor dynamometer tests for characterization or model validation.

• Experience defining test mat

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