Autonomous Flight Controls Engineer Intern

Namely; South San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 24,000 - 36,000; Full time

Job summary

Zipline is seeking a Flight Controls internship to learn how we fly autonomous aircraft in challenging conditions. You will work with data from flight testing and simulations to identify insights that help improve our design and contribute to system changes that will be deployed in production.

You will gain hands-on experience implementing algorithms, running simulations, and presenting results to the engineering team. The program runs Jan–Apr/May 2027 at SSF or Dallas.

Qualifications

• Your applied math skills stand out even among aerospace engineers.
• You think simulations and working with hardware are both fun.
• You have owned and developed controls solutions for a team project, thesis, or competition
• Exposure in one or more of the following areas: precision inertial navigation, dynamic modeling of complex systems, linear control analysis, or optimal control with uncertainty.
• Software engineering skills, preferably with both embedded software (C, C++, Rust) and technical computing (MATLAB, python, Julia, etc.). Experience with Github and working in a multi-developer environment is an advantage.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the design, implementation, testing and release of innovative flight algorithms that improve the operational performance of our vehicle controllers
• Create tools and tests to demonstrate your design performance and protect against software regressions, using both theoretical guarantees and simulations
• Develop and improve simulation and other controls analysis tools so we can predict vehicle performance ahead of time and prove safety and reliability
• Analyze flight data to assess recent changes and upgrades, looking for regressions and potential areas for future improvement
• Design onboard integrity tests to communicate when the system performance is degraded
• Present key results and changes to the broader engineering team

Skills

Applied math

Simulation & hardware

Controls development

Inertial navigation

Embedded software

Tools

C/C++

Rust

MATLAB

Python

GitHub

Job description

Zipline is seeking a Flight Controls internship to learn how we fly autonomous aircraft in challenging conditions. You will work with data from flight testing and simulations to identify insights that help improve our design and contribute to system changes that will be deployed in production.

You will gain hands-on experience implementing algorithms, running simulations, and presenting results to the engineering team. The program runs Jan–Apr/May 2027 at SSF or Dallas.