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Zipline is the world's largest autonomous drone delivery service, operating on four continents and completing millions of deliveries of blood, vaccines, medical supplies, food, and retail products. The company has flown over 140 million commercial autonomous miles and makes a delivery somewhere globally every 30 seconds.
This role focuses on developing and owning the analytical and numerical modeling capabilities for electric motors across Zipline's aircraft platforms. You will build a common motor-modeling framework that enables rapid design-space exploration, performance tradeoff analysis, and motor optimization as part of the complete aircraft system.
Key responsibilities include:
- Develop, validate, and maintain electromagnetic models for propulsion and auxiliary motors
- Build reusable libraries of motor models, assumptions, material data, winding definitions, and validation evidence
- Generate torque-speed envelopes, efficiency maps, loss breakdowns, voltage/current requirements, flux-linkage and inductance maps, demagnetization limits, and fault-performance data
- Create scalable design-space datasets and perform sensitivity and uncertainty studies across geometry, materials, windings, temperature, tolerances, and operating conditions
- Develop reduced-order and surrogate models for aircraft optimization, mission simulation, controls development, and thermal analysis
- Integrate motor models with inverter, battery, propeller, thermal, and aircraft mission models
- Evaluate motor architectures, electromagnetic materials, supplier concepts, and emerging technologies using first-principles analysis and simulation
- Optimize designs for efficiency, mass, torque density, thermal performance, acoustic behavior, controllability, reliability, and cost
- Develop model-validation plans and execute dynamometer experiments to characterize motor performance
- Analyze measurement uncertainty and sources of discrepancy between simulation and experiment to improve model fidelity
- Work closely with mechanical, thermal, power electronics, controls, aerodynamics, systems, and vehicle-performance engineers
This is a highly cross-functional role requiring strong electric-machine fundamentals, practical modeling judgment, and the ability to translate complex simulation results into clear engineering decisions that optimize aircraft-level outcomes including range, payload, acoustic performance, thermal margin, reliability, mass, and cost.
