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 droid is the delivery container at the heart of our delivery system.

It's what detaches from the aircraft on a tether, descends 300 feet, and places your order on a driveway, or picks up an order at a merchant's zipping point and returns to the aircraft. The interaction between the droid and the zipping point infrastructure is the most cycled, most reliability-critical mechanical interface in our system. We're designing EV3, the next generation of the droid and the next versions of our ground pickup stations.

As we scale toward thousands of units in production and tens of thousands of flight cycles per unit, we need someone to own the ground testing that makes that scale credible - every fixture, life-test rig, environmental chamber, and automated bring-up station that proves the droid and zipping point work reliably together while exceeding our reliability targets. You'll join a small, deeply cross-disciplinary hardware team building and testing our future systems end-to-end.

What You'Ll Do

Own the ground test strategy for the droid and its interaction with zipping point infrastructure - from pickup and drop-off mechanics, to tether engagement, to environmental exposure of the mated system. Design, build, and deploy custom mechanical test fixtures and life-test rigs, from concept through fabrication, bring-up, and long-duration operation Develop the electrical and instrumentation side of these test systems. Load cells, thermocouples, encoders, current sensing, motor drivers, pneumatic actuators, DAQ, safety interlocks, etc.

Write the automation software that runs them - Python scripting, data logging, live health monitoring, automated pass/fail evaluation, integration into our broader hardware test framework. Drive test campaigns from early prototype validation through qualification, life testing, and production end-of-line testing. Triage and root-cause failures across mechanical, electrical, and firmware domains, using data, test heritage, and one-off targeted campaigns.

Requirements

when the physics doesn't support them, and proposing changes when testing reveals opportunities to improve reliability.

Hardware Test Engineer, Droid