Sr. Manager, Powertrain Test Engineering

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's electric powertrain system defines the performance of our delivery system, having direct impact on our wind and temperature performance, the maximum payload, and the total energy available.

As the leader for Powertrain Test Engineering, you will be responsible for the deep characterization of powertrain components including performance, efficiency, and model validation. Your team is also responsible for durability testing for fatigue, wear-out, and performance in the range of loads and forces experienced in flight. Zipline's hardware components are optimized to the maximum possible, given extreme mass considerations and extreme temperature conditions driving bespoke materials, coating, structural design, and electromagnetic.

Your role is extremely high autonomy and decision-making, and will work closely as part of design engineering cycles. The team is often the first to find major hardware capabilities and issues, therefore you are often on the front-line for complex problem solving.

What You'Ll Do

• Hire, lead, and grow a team of specialist test engineers and technicians responsible for motor and actuator performance, propeller performance, and component qualification and life testing. • Develop and drive multi-month test campaigns for BLDC motor performance (torque/speed curves, efficiency mapping, back-EMF and cogging torque characterization) across the full flight envelope, including edge-of-envelope and failure-mode conditions. • Own test methods for motor electromagnetic performance: flux linkage, inductance, torque ripple, iron and copper losses, switching losses, hysteresis, demagnetization risk, and EMI/EMC behavior, partnering with Electrical and Controls Engineering to validate motor models against thrust testing and dynamometer data.

• Develop and validate thermal models against instrumented test data; design thermal test setups to characterize heat generation, dissipation paths, and thermal limits, and use results to close the loop with Design Engineering on cooling strategy and derating curves. • Own propeller test programs including propeller performance (thrust, power, efficiency, acoustic signature) and structural durability, including fatigue and damage-tolerance testing under representative and oscillatory loading.