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Zipline

Builds and runs autonomous drone delivery

Mechanical Engineering Manager

Engineering LeadershipConfirmed live in the last 24 hours
Full-timeSouth San Francisco, CA, USA$195k - $245kIn-person

About the Job

Requirements

  • Past success managing and developing an excellent team of mechanical engineers.
  • A record of hiring strong engineers and creating a culture of ownership, urgency, and technical rigor.
  • Experience leading first-of-a-kind electromechanical products from architecture through production and field deployment.
  • Significant direct technical contributions to mechanical product architecture earlier in the candidate's career.
  • Deep experience with mechanisms, structures, actuators, sensors, electronics integration, and high-cycle moving assemblies.
  • Strong fundamentals in hand calculations, geometric dimensioning and tolerancing, tolerance analysis, materials, fatigue, wear, bolted joints, and finite element analysis.
  • Experience designing around printed circuit board assemblies, harnesses, connectors, motors, transmissions, sensors, and embedded control systems.
  • Experience with sheet metal, injection-molded plastics, machined parts, castings, extrusions, seals, and relevant high-volume processes.
  • Demonstrated success with design for manufacturing, design for assembly, supplier engagement, inspection planning, and manufacturing ramp.
  • Experience defining validation plans and demonstrating safety, reliability, environmental, and lifetime requirements.
  • Experience resolving complex production or field failures through disciplined root-cause analysis.
  • Strong customer judgment and understanding that usability, serviceability, and fault recovery are engineering requirements.
  • Strong written, verbal, and visual communication skills.

Responsibilities

  • Manage, mentor, and develop a high-performing team of mechanical engineers.
  • Hire exceptional engineers and establish clear ownership, technical direction, and execution plans.
  • Own the Dropbox mechanical architecture and roadmap from requirements through field deployment.
  • Lead development of the enclosure, structure, elevator, lid and access mechanisms, latches, package interfaces, droid interfaces, electronics packaging, harnessing, sealing, and service features.
  • Translate customer and system needs into mechanical requirements, interface definitions, and validation plans.
  • Drive system trade-offs across safety, reliability, user experience, throughput, installation, serviceability, manufacturability, cost, and schedule.
  • Establish system-level datum structures, geometric dimensioning and tolerancing, alignment schemes, and tolerance strategies.
  • Integrate mechanical design with sensing and firmware behavior for motion control, homing, access control, obstruction detection, fault handling, and service recovery.
  • Guide the selection and integration of motors, actuators, transmissions, bearings, sensors, connectors, printed circuit board assemblies, harnesses, and seals.
  • Ensure designs account for fatigue, wear, contamination, water ingress, corrosion, thermal variation, misuse, package variation, and installation variation.
  • Use first-principles analysis, hand calculations, tolerance analysis, kinematic analysis, finite element analysis, prototypes, and testing to guide decisions.
  • Drive design reviews, design failure mode and effects analyses, hazard assessments, fault-tree analyses, and risk-retirement plans.
  • Define component and system testing for functionality, lifetime, environmental exposure, abuse, obstruction, motion faults, package variation, and droid handoff.
  • Lead Dropbox through prototype builds, engineering validation, design validation, production validation, and volume ramp.
  • Partner with new product introduction, Manufacturing, Quality, Supply Chain, and suppliers to achieve scalable, high-yield production.
  • Drive design for manufacturing and design for assembly across sheet metal, injection-molded plastics, machined parts, castings, extrusions, seals, and electromechanical assemblies.
  • Lead responses to test, production, and field failures, including containment, root cause, corrective action, and permanent resolution.
  • Use field reliability, service, and telemetry data to prioritize product improvements.
  • Reduce failure rates, recovery time, maintenance burden, installation complexity, and total cost of ownership.

Desired Qualifications

  • Experience with outdoor, unattended, or customer-facing electromechanical products.
  • Experience in robotics, industrial automation, material handling, automotive, appliances, kiosks, or similar systems.
  • Experience designing powered mechanisms that operate around untrained users.
  • Experience with environmental sealing, drainage, condensation, corrosion, and wide-temperature operation.
  • Experience using fleet telemetry or reliability data to improve mechanical hardware.
  • Experience with Siemens NX.
  • Aerospace, automotive, medical, or similarly rigorous validation experience.

About the Company

Zipline

Builds and runs autonomous drone delivery

Zipline builds and operates autonomous drone delivery networks for retailers, restaurants and healthcare systems that need to move products without road traffic. Its electric aircraft carry food, prescriptions and other supplies from partner sites or distribution hubs to customers and health facilities. The company combines aircraft, charging equipment and delivery software with flight operations, so partners buy a logistics service rather than manage their own drones. Merchants use its ordering and tracking tools to reach customers, while governments and health systems contract for medical supply delivery. Zipline was founded in 2014 and has its headquarters in South San Francisco, California.

Company size
1,001-5,000
Company stage
Late Stage VC
Total funding
$3.6B
Headquarters
South San Francisco, CA
Founded
2014

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