Autonomous Flight Controls Intern

Zipline; South San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 52,000 - 68,000; Full time

Job summary

Zipline’s Flight Controls team is seeking an intern to learn how we fly autonomous aircraft in challenging conditions. You will work with flight testing data and our global fleet to identify insights that improve design, with tangible contributions that fly.

Internship is full-time and in-person at South San Francisco or Dallas, with a Summer 2027 timeline from May/June to August/September. Applicants are limited to three applications in 30 days.

Qualifications

• Strong applied mathematics skills relevant to aerospace controls.
• Interest in simulations and hardware integration.
• Experience owning and developing control solutions for a team project, thesis, or competition.
• Exposure to one or more: precision inertial navigation, dynamic modeling, linear control analysis, or optimal control with uncertainty.
• Software engineering skills: embedded software (C, C++, Rust) and technical computing (MATLAB, Python, Julia). Github experience is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to design, implementation, testing and release of flight algorithms for vehicle controllers.
• Create tools and tests to demonstrate performance and protect against regressions.
• Develop simulation and control analysis tools to predict performance and prove safety.
• Analyze flight data to assess changes, regressions and future improvements.
• Design onboard integrity tests to indicate degraded system performance.
• Present results and changes to the engineering team.

Skills

Applied math

Control systems

Simulations

Software engineering

Tools

C/C++

Rust

MATLAB

Python

Julia

Github

Job description

Zipline’s Flight Controls team is seeking an intern to learn how we fly autonomous aircraft in challenging conditions. You will work with flight testing data and our global fleet to identify insights that improve design, with tangible contributions that fly.

Internship is full-time and in-person at South San Francisco or Dallas, with a Summer 2027 timeline from May/June to August/September. Applicants are limited to three applications in 30 days.