Senior / Staff Mechanical Design Engineer (All Teams)

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 aircraft and ground systems that operate daily in various field conditions. You will own hardware that directly affects flight safety, fleet reliability, manufacturability, and the speed at which we scale service to new regions. This posting represents a pipeline across several hardware teams (Avionics, Structures & Mechanisms, Powertrain & Battery, Ground Systems).

Candidates will be matched to the best team and level during hiring. Senior and Staff levels differ by scope: Senior owns complex subsystems or end-to-end features within a single program; Staff owns cross-team platforms, defines technical direction, and leads multiple programs or supplier partnerships.

What You'll Do

• Own end-to-end delivery of mechanical subsystems from requirements → design → build → test → release → production sustainment for assigned team(s).

• SMI: Deliver a mass-production ready servo mechanism with validated life-cycle test

• Avionics: Own and design avionics enclosures considering thermal, EMI, cost, mass, and manufacturing constraints

• Battery & Power Electronics: Design battery enclosures that meet MIL-like vibration, thermal/ overpressure criteria, and safety requirements

• Propulsion and Propeller: Benchmark, size, and design a custom motor using system level inputs while incorporating industry leading technology. Guide design through characterization, validation, and to mass production

• Produce and defend system-level trade studies, tolerance stacks, load paths, failure modes, and hand-calcs that bound designs for safety-critical loads and manufacturability.

• Create CAD assemblies, detailed drawings, GD&T, and manufacturing documentation for 20–100 part assemblies; own design reviews, DFM, and first-article criteria.

• Develop and execute verification plans (environmental, fatigue, vibration, thermal, EMI/EMC where applicable), build test rigs/fixtures, run test campaigns, analyze results, and close findings with corrective actions and measurable reliability improvements

• Lead supplier selection, qualification, and handoff: drive DFM feedback, define inspection criteria, and reduce supplier NPI cycle time and scrap rates. Own escalation and remediation when supplier output risks field operations

• Cross-functional interface: partner daily with Systems, Software, Production, Integration & Test, Reliability, and Field Ops to align requirements, manage trade-offs, and eliminate deployment blockers

• Ship for scale: translate prototypes into designs that meet target cost, cycle time, and inspection rates for medium-volume production; own metrics for manufacturability and in-field reliability and drive them to target.

• Mentor peers (Senior) or set cross-team standards and lead technical programs (Staff). Take technical authority in design reviews and postmortems; lead incident root-cause investigations when field events occur.

• Produce and defend system-level trade studies, tolerance stacks, load paths, failure modes, and hand-calcs that bound designs for safety-critical loads and manufacturability.

• Create CAD assemblies, detailed drawings, GD&T , and manufacturing documentation for 20–100 part assemblies; own design reviews, DFM , and first-article criteria.

• Develop and execute verification plans (environmental, fatigue, vibration, thermal, EMI/ EMC where applicable), build test rigs/fixtures, run test campaigns, analyze results, and close findings with corrective actions and measurable reliability improvements

• Lead supplier selection, qualification, and handoff: drive DFM feedback, define inspection criteria, and reduce supplier NPI cycle time and scrap rates. Own escalation and remediation when supplier output risks field operations

• Cross-functional interface: partner daily with Systems, Software, Production, Integration & Test, Reliability, and Field Ops to align requirements, manage trade-offs, and eliminate deployment blockers

• Ship for scale: translate prototypes into designs that meet target cost, cycle time, and inspection rates for medium-volume production; own metrics for manufacturability and in-field reliability and drive them to target.

• Mentor peers (Senior) or set cross-team standards and lead technical programs (Staff). Take technical authority in design reviews and postmortems; lead incident root-cause investigations when fie

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