Failure Analysis Engineer - Materials

Socket.dev; South San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Zipline is seeking a Failure Analysis Engineer to own the triage, investigation, and conclusions of hardware failures. You will determine how and why a failure occurred, preserve evidence, and shape design decisions across engineering and operations.

This role is based at Zipline’s South San Francisco lab. You will work across SEM/EDS, CT, FTIR, metallography, and mechanical testing to build strong, evidence-based conclusions and influence corrective actions.

Qualifications

• 3+ years in Failure Analysis or related hardware engineering.
• Experience investigating hardware failures and developing defensible conclusions from physical evidence.
• Hands-on experience with multiple failure analysis and materials characterization techniques such as optical microscopy, SEM/EDS, metallography and cross-sectioning, CT/X-ray inspection, FTIR, hardness testing, mechanical testing, DSC/TGA, or similar methods.

Responsibilities

• Lead evidence-based investigations of test, manufacturing, supplier, and field failures; determine the physical failure mechanism and establish confidence in the conclusion.
• Own Failure Analysis cases from intake through technical conclusion, including hardware handling, inspection strategy, test sequencing, laboratory execution, external lab coordination as needed, and technical documentation.
• Preserve and develop physical evidence through inspection and analytical workflows, including SEM/EDS, CT, FTIR, cross-sectioning, metallography, and mechanical testing with traceability.
• Identify failure mechanisms such as fatigue, overload, corrosion, wear, embrittlement, contamination, and manufacturing defects.
• Build standardized Failure Analysis workflows, report formats, evidence-handling practices, confidence assessments, and failure-mechanism nomenclature.
• Build and maintain a centralized Failure Analysis knowledge base to track recurring mechanisms across programs.
• Partner with design, manufacturing, reliability, supplier quality, test, systems, and operations teams to influence design standards and qualification testing.
• Review proposed corrective actions and provide technical justification to ensure they address the identified mechanism.
• Drive outcomes in investigation quality, prevention of repeat failures, and cross-program learning.

Skills

Failure Analysis

Materials Science

Hardware Engineering

Data Analysis

Laboratory Methods

Cross-functional Collaboration

Tools

Optical microscopy

SEM/EDS

CT/X-ray inspection

FTIR

Cross-sectioning

Metallography

Mechanical testing

DSC/TGA

Job description

About Zipline

Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service. We are on a mission to serve all humans equally by ensuring access to food, medicine and essential goods anytime, anywhere. We design, build, and operate the world’s largest autonomous logistics system, delivering critical supplies quickly and reliably. Today, Zipline operates on four continents, makes a delivery somewhere in the world every 30 seconds, and has completed millions of deliveries to date, including blood, vaccines, medical supplies, food, and retail products.

Our customers include the world’s largest and most prominent healthcare systems, governments, retailers, restaurants and global businesses who rely on us to save lives, reduce emissions, increase economic opportunity, and provide delivery from point A to point B as fast as possible. The drone is only 15% of what we’ve built to enable seamless, reliable, global operations.

Our system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and gives people time back. With more than 140 million commercial autonomous miles safely flown, Zipline is redefining access to healthcare, consumer products, and food across the globe.

We operate at a global scale and are looking for practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth. Our team is motivated by building systems that have a direct, meaningful impact on people’s lives and by scaling the future of logistics. We are seeking people who sculpt from first principles, enjoy facing adversity, and can do the impossible at record breaking speeds.

About You and The Role

At Zipline, you will own the triage, execution, and success of Failure Analysis. You will determine what failed, how it failed, why it failed, and what physical evidence supports that conclusion. Your work will directly influence product reliability, fleet health, design decisions, supplier controls, qualification testing, manufacturing processes, and future product architecture. You will work between Failure Analysis and Material Science to investigate consequential hardware failures, preserve and interpret physical evidence, recognize recurring mechanisms across programs, and ensure that lessons learned from failures do not remain isolated within individual teams.

This role works across engineering and operations. You will own the physical investigation and technical conclusion while partnering with responsible engineering teams on root cause, containment, corrective actions, validation, and issue closure. This role is based at Zipline’s manufacturing and test lab facility in South San Francisco.

How to know if it's you: You are methodical about preserving evidence and skeptical of conclusions that are not supported by data. You know the right tool for the job. You enjoy moving between the lab floor and an engineering review, and you can explain a complicated failure mechanism in a way that everyone understands. On any given day you could be examining a fracture surface under a SEM, cross-sectioning a component to find a crack origin, reviewing CT data before teardown, identifying contaminants, coordinating an external laboratory investigation, or working with engineers across the company to determine whether a proposed corrective action effectively addresses the identified failure mechanism.

What You’ll Do

• Lead evidence-based investigations of consequential test, manufacturing, supplier, and field failures; determine the physical failure mechanism, and establish confidence in the conclusion.
• Own Failure Analysis cases from intake through technical conclusion, including hardware handling, inspection strategy, test sequencing, laboratory execution, external lab coordination as needed, technical documentation, and communication of results.
• Preserve and develop physical evidence through appropriate inspection and analytical workflows including optical microscopy, SEM/EDS, CT, FTIR, cross-sectioning, metallography, mechanical testing, and related techniques while maintaining traceability through the entire process.
• Identify mechanisms such as fatigue, overload, corrosion, stress-corrosion cracking, embrittlement, wear, delamination, porosity, contamination, processing defects, coating failures, and other material or manufacturing-driven failure modes.
• Build standardized Failure Analysis workflows, report formats, evidence-handling practices, confidence assessments, and failure-mechanism nomenclature so investigations are consistent and reusable across the company.
• Build and maintain a centralized, searchable body of Failure Analysis knowledge that allows repeat and cross-program failure mechanisms to be tracked and connected
• Partner with design, manufacturing, reliability, supplier quality, test, systems, and operations teams to ensure Failure Analysis findings influence design standards, supplier requirements, qualification testing, inspection criteria, maintenance strategy, and fleet decisions.
• Review proposed corrective actions and provide technical expertise and evidence to ensure they address the identified physical failure mechanism.
• Drive measurable outcomes including the quality and coverage of investigations, prevention of repeat failure mechanisms, recognition of recurring patterns across programs, and the number of engineering decisions improved or de-risked by Failure Analysis evidence.

What You’ll Bring

• 3+ years of hands-on experience in Failure Analysis, Materials Science, Materials Engineering, or a related hardware engineering discipline.
• Demonstrated experience independently investigating hardware failures and developing defensible conclusions from physical evidence.
• Hands-on experience with multiple Failure Analysis and materials characterization techniques such as optical microscopy, SEM/EDS, metallography and cross-sectioning, CT/X-ray inspection, FTIR, hardness testing, mechanical testing, DSC,TGA, or similar analytical methods.
• Strong understanding of material failure mechanisms including fracture, fatigue, corrosion, wear, material degradation, manufacturing defects, and environmentally assisted failure.
• Deep expertise in Failure Analysis of at least one major class of engineering materials or hardware (metals, polymers, adhesives, coatings, solder systems, composites, or electronic/mechanical assemblies), with demonstrated ability to apply first-principles analytical reasoning across unfamiliar materials and failure mechanisms.
• Ability to design an investigation from first principles
• Experience developing laboratory methods, technical documentation, databases, or institutional Failure Analysis processes.
• Experience working with external analytical laboratories and suppliers
• Must-have traits: deep curiosity, clear owner mentality, disciplined evidence handling and documentation, strong technical judgment, comfort operating with incomplete information, and a bias toward finding the simplest investigation that can decisively answer the engineering question.
• Location: role is based in South San Francisco.
• Must be eligible to work in the US.

What Else You Need To Know

Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws or our own sensibilities.

We value diversity at Zipline and welcome applications from those who are traditionally underrepresented in tech.

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.

As set forth in Zipline ’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.