Staff Flight Test Operator, Esparto

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 The Staff Flight Test Operator is a technical leader responsible for planning, prioritization, execution, and continuous improvement of Zipline’s large scale, flight testing operation.

This role blends deep systems-level engineering thinking with hands-on flight operations expertise to ensure we test the right things, at the right time, with precision, velocity, and uncompromising safety. You will own the integration and execution of complex test campaigns, resolve technical blockers, raise and mitigate risks, and translate flight test results into actionable engineering insights. You will also lead multi-week validation campaigns, manage resources and infrastructure bring-up, and pioneer new tools and processes that expand the throughput and quality of Zipline’s flight testing capability.

This role requires someone who thrives at the intersection of engineering, operations, and leadership, jumping into detailed data analysis or debugging, and guiding teams through ambiguous, high-stakes challenges.

What You'Ll Do

Serve as a senior cross-functional leader, aligning Design Engineering, Flight Test Engineering, Operations, and site leadership. Work with engineering teams to prioritize test execution - ensuring the highest-value tests are executed first. Manage resource planning, and infrastructure bring-up for major validation campaigns.

Execute complex flight tests, including prelight instrumentation, monitoring of automated tests, incident response, and data collection. Rapidly debug and resolve flight test issues across hardware, software, controls, and operations. Analyze flight data to identify anomalies, validate performance, and recommend next steps.

Generate clear, actionable test reports that drive engineering decision-making. Support FAA Type Certification activities by executing specific test protocols, demonstrations, and documentation tasks. Identify and lead operational process, software tooling, and infrastructure improvements to increase test precision, insights, capacity, and velocity.

Serve as shift lead when needed, ensuring safe, high quality, and well coordinated test execution. Mentor and support junior flight test operators, offering guidance, training, removing blockers, reinforcing SOP compliance and improving their technical and operational performance. Travel to support flight operations at different test sites as needed.