Avionics Hardware Engineer – PCBAs for Flight Systems

Zipline; South San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 130,000 - 186,000; Full time

Job summary

Zipline designs, manufactures, and operates autonomous delivery systems with a focus on avionics, sensing, power, and ground‑support hardware. These systems must work in the real world across environments and manufacturing variation.

You will collaborate onsite in South San Francisco with hardware, manufacturing, and test teams, bringing up PCBAs, validating designs, and supporting prototype builds toward production readiness.

Qualifications

• Strong fundamentals in analog, digital, mixed‑signal, power, sensing, and communication circuits.
• Hands‑on experience with PCBAs, schematic capture, board bring‑up, electrical debugging, or hardware validation.
• Ability to use common lab equipment such as oscilloscopes, multimeters, power supplies, logic analyzers, or electronic loads.
• Ability to read schematics, datasheets, test plans, and basic layout or manufacturing documentation.
• Structured debugging, documenting results, and communicating technical findings clearly.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; able to learn from feedback.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the design and development of avionics and ground‑support PCBAs, including digital, analog, sensing, communications, power, and control circuits.
• Support schematic capture, component selection, interface definition, and board‑level integration with guidance from experienced engineers.
• Help bring up new boards, run bench tests, collect data, and summarize results to support design validation and release decisions.
• Work with PCB layout, mechanical engineering, and firmware teams to close interface, packaging, thermal, and manufacturability issues.
• Support validation testing, troubleshooting, and root‑cause investigations for issues found during bring‑up, qualification, manufacturing, or flight test.
• Contribute to requirements, test procedures, design documentation, release packages, and change‑control records for avionics hardware.
• Participate in design reviews and learn to evaluate tradeoffs across performance, reliability, manufacturability, weight, power, and cost.
• Work with manufacturing, test, quality, and operations teams to support prototype builds, production readiness, and fielded hardware improvements.
• Build good engineering judgment by asking questions early, documenting work clearly, and following problems through to resolution.

Skills

Electrical engineering fundamentals

PCB design

Schematic capture

Board bring-up

Electrical debugging

Hardware validation

Education

Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or related field

Tools

Altium Designer

Oscilloscopes

Multimeters

Logic analyzers

Power supplies

Job description

Zipline designs, manufactures, and operates autonomous delivery systems with a focus on avionics, sensing, power, and ground‑support hardware. These systems must work in the real world across environments and manufacturing variation.

You will collaborate onsite in South San Francisco with hardware, manufacturing, and test teams, bringing up PCBAs, validating designs, and supporting prototype builds toward production readiness.