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Salary: USD 175,000 - 255,000 / annual
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 in the world every 30 seconds.
The Long Range Platform engineering team is responsible for designing aircraft and ground systems for launch and recovery. This fixed-wing platform is capable of flying over 200 km on a single charge and has been operational since 2016, serving millions across Africa with thousands of life-saving deliveries daily.
In this role, you will own electrical subsystems end-to-end: from architecture development and schematic design through bring-up, validation, production, and field support. You'll work within an existing airborne architecture, owning meaningful subsystem improvements and enabling new capabilities while maintaining the stability of a live production system. You'll develop hardware for the next generation platform architecture, which involves designing electronics in areas such as microprocessors, high-speed communication, GNSS, brushless DC motor drives, power supply, battery management, and more.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own the electrical design for volume production through a complete design cycle: requirements, prototype, schematic capture, layout, and validation
- Make impactful design decisions daily with high independence
- Lead trade studies, understand competing design priorities, and provide direction for risk reduction
- Collaborate cross-functionally with reliability, mechanical, embedded, and systems engineers across concept, design, validation, production, and deployment phases
- Support supplier and manufacturer visits, product deployment, and field validation (occasional travel)
You'll work in a fast-paced, hands-on, collaborative environment where your work directly impacts lives. The role requires balancing practical constraints with elegant solutions and troubleshooting field issues to develop rapid mitigations.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering or related field with strong foundation in first principles engineering
- Minimum 4 years of experience designing complex PCBAs, including circuit analysis, schematic capture, PCB layout, packaging, integration, production, and board-level validation
- Experience with at least some of the following: mixed signal design, high-speed design, lithium-ion battery pack design (BMS, safety, power distribution), BLDC motor drives, embedded communications buses (SPI, I2C, UART, CAN), higher-speed communications (Ethernet, LVDS)
- Enthusiasm for fast-paced, hands-on, collaborative, cross-functional environments
- Hands-on lab experience with common equipment: oscilloscope, DMM, TDR, LCR, network analyzer
- Clear communication skills to explain technical challenges to both engineers and non-engineers
- Must be eligible to work in the US
- Must be able to work at Zipline's South San Francisco office
