Staff Electrical Engineer

Do you want to change the world? Zipline is on a mission to transform the way goods move. Our aim is to solve the world’s most urgent and complex access challenges by building, manufacturing and operating the first instant delivery and logistics system that serves all humans equally, wherever they are. From powering Rwanda’s national blood delivery network and Ghana’s COVID-19 vaccine distribution, to providing on-demand home delivery for Walmart, to enabling healthcare providers to bring care directly to U.S. homes, we are transforming the way things move for businesses, governments and consumers. The technology is complex but the idea is simple: a teleportation service that delivers what you need, when you need it. Through our technology that includes robotics and autonomy, we are decarbonizing delivery, decreasing road congestion, and reducing fossil fuel consumption and air pollution, while providing equitable access to billions of people and building a more resilient global supply chain.
 
Join Zipline and help us to make good on our promise to build an equitable and more resilient global supply chain for billions of people.

About You and The Role  

The Staff Electrical Engineer will develop avionics for our next-generation aircraft. We are looking for an engineer with a strong foundation in circuit board design and an excellent grasp of electronics development, processes, and tools. 

As a Staff Electrical Engineer on the Avionics team, you will be responsible for designing electronics including flight computers, communication systems, safety systems, and more. These components are at the core of a new unmanned aerial system that will enable Zipline’s impact to expand from 100,000 deliveries/year to 100 million across the globe. In addition, you will have the opportunity to collaborate with world class engineers across all disciplines and experience levels. Zipline values personal development highly and encourages an environment of continuous learning and mentorship. 

The Avionics team encounters many challenges when designing robust avionics systems to provide life-saving service in some of the harshest environments on Earth. At the start of any project, our team plays a vital role in system architecture, designing for performance, reliability, and fault tolerance, while balancing mass and cost. Included in this is the design of an FAA-approved safety system to ensure the safety of employees, customers, and bystanders. Our sophisticated flight systems also require us to build custom solutions with high performance embedded computing and high speed serial buses. To achieve Zipline’s goal of serving anyone anywhere, all aspects of a design must also be successful in a wide range of real-world environments by being robust against environmental, ESD, and EMI threats. These are just some of the many challenges that make us excited to go to work everyday.

What You'll Do  

• Engineer avionics for volume production through a full design cycle including requirements, prototype, schematic capture, layout, and validation, with a focus on compute, sensing, and perception.
• Shape the architecture of Zipline’s next generation product, making impactful design decisions daily, while working with a high level of independence.
• Lead trade studies, understand competing design priorities, develop hardware requirements to meet system level requirements and provide direction and clarity for burning down risk.
• Proactively seek out opportunities for improvement in system, vehicle, and component level design.
• Collaborate cross-functionally in all stages of development, including:
  • Architecture: fault tolerance, power, mass, thermals, perception performance
  • Detailed Design: schematic capture, PCB layout, system integration, validation
  • Production: quality, failure analysis, manufacturability, reliability, cost
    

What You'll Bring 

• A degree in Electrical Engineering, Embedded Hardware Engineering or equivalent practical experience.
• Minimum 7 years of design experience including: circuit design, schematic capture, PCB layout, packaging, integration, cost reduction, sourcing and transitioning a product to production.
• Past success developing electronics for critical systems in fields such as aerospace, transportation, or medical devices.
• Design experience with mixed-signal, high-speed digital, SoM compute integration, high-speed serial busses, and electro-magnetic compatibility.
• Experience working with any of DDR, CSI, PCIe, SPI, UART, USB is a preferred qualification.
• Experience working with WiFi, Cell, GNSS, ADS-B, Cameras, Microphones is a preferred qualification.
• Experience with electronics design of high volume consumer electronics products including mobile devices, laptops, and automotive is a preferred qualification. Experience working on fail safe and fail operational electronics including aerospace and medical is a preferred qualification.
• Enthusiasm for working in a fast-paced, collaborative, cross-functional environment.
• Clear communication skills and the ability to explain technical challenges to both fellow engineers and non-engineers alike.
• Must be eligible to work in the US.
• Must be able to work at Zipline’s South San Francisco office.
  

What Else You Need to Know