Mechanical Design Engineer - Droid SMI

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. It is also the part of Zipline that our customers actually see, hold, and interact with, which makes it one of the most demanding products we build. It has to be beautiful, cheap, quiet, weatherproof, thermally stable, and reliable for tens of thousands of flight cycles.

We're designing EV3 , the next generation of the droid, and we're looking for a design engineer who can own subsystems of this product end-to-end.

Requirements

it has to meet, taking those

into architecture and detailed design, prototyping and iterating, and then following the design all the way through DFM , tooling, first article, and production ramp. And then, because we're serious about scale, designing the test fixtures and assembly aids that make it possible to build and validate it consistently at rate. You'll join a small, deeply cross-disciplinary hardware team building EV3 end-to-end.

for your subsystems, working with systems engineering, operations, and cross-functional hardware leads to make sure what you build is what the product actually needs. Design in CAD (we use Siemens NX) with the fluency to iterate through architectures and designs quickly. Use hand calcs, FEA, clean first-principles thinking and prototyping to bound problems, size parts, and down select between options.

Design the test fixtures, assembly aids, and inspection tooling that your subsystem needs to be built and validated at rate, while partnering closely with our test engineering team on life-test rigs and end-of-line testers.

What You'Ll Do

Own subsystems of the droid end-to-end, from architecture, detailed design, prototyping, validation, DFM, tooling, and production ramp. Partner directly with our industrial design team to translate ID intent into engineered product - surfacing, split lines, materials, finishes, color, tactile feel. Without sacrificing manufacturability, cost, or reliability.