Chief Systems Engineer, Autonomous Flight Platforms

Zipline; South San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Zipline is seeking a senior systems engineering leader to define product capabilities roadmaps and decompose them into concrete architectures. You will validate and verify capabilities across current platforms and novel autonomous aircraft concepts, leading a team toward scalable, safe operations.

You will drive cross‑functional discussions, develop frameworks for trade studies, and create system models while partnering with safety and regulatory teams to prove flight worthiness.

Qualifications

• Proven leadership delivering complex technical solutions.
• Strong systems engineering experience on safety-critical autonomous systems.
• Experience in product requirements, architecture, interfaces, verification planning.

Responsibilities

• Define product-level requirements, architecture, decomposition, verification plans and metrics.
• Own system-level architecture, interfaces, and test coverage for high-reliability autonomous systems.
• Lead cross-disciplinary discussions to align architectures and roadmaps.
• Develop trade studies to optimize performance, safety, and cost.
• Set hardware/software release standards and collaborative safety cases with regulators.

Skills

Leadership

Systems engineering

Autonomous systems

Cross-functional collaboration

Modeling & diagrams

Education

Bachelor's degree in engineering

Tools

SysML

Requirements mgmt tools

Job description

Zipline is seeking a senior systems engineering leader to define product capabilities roadmaps and decompose them into concrete architectures. You will validate and verify capabilities across current platforms and novel autonomous aircraft concepts, leading a team toward scalable, safe operations.

You will drive cross‑functional discussions, develop frameworks for trade studies, and create system models while partnering with safety and regulatory teams to prove flight worthiness.