Mechanical & Scaling Engineer, Droid

Namely; South San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Zipline is seeking a mechanical engineer to own end-to-end NPI for droid subsystems, driving from design through full-rate production. You will lead test campaigns, stand up production lines at contract manufacturers, and coordinate with design, TPM, and supply chain to ensure scalable, producible solutions.

You will travel internationally to suppliers and manufacturing partners, apply GD&T and CAD skills to push for robust, high-volume parts, and advocate for design-for-manufacturing throughout

Qualifications

• BS or MS in Mechanical Engineering, Mechatronics, or a related field with 5+ years of hands-on experience delivering physical products from design through production.
• Track record of taking mechanical designs through the full NPI cycle—DVT, PVT, tooling release, first article, and ramp—on a product program.
• Direct experience running or contributing to test campaigns for mechanical or electromechanical hardware.
• CAD fluency to make drawing-ready changes (Siemens NX); Creo, CATIA, or SolidWorks experience is valuable.
• Comfortable with GD&T, tolerance analysis, and reading/marking production drawings.
• Experience with manufacturing methods: injection molding, thermoplastics/thermosets, EPP foam molding, stamping, CNC machining, and ramping parts to rate.
• Strong supplier engagement skills and ability to run a clean FAI and establish CM relationships.

Responsibilities

• Take droid subsystems from the design phase through DVT, PVT, tooling release, first article, and full-rate production.
• Own test campaigns for the subsystems you drive: write test plans, coordinate fixtures, run campaigns, and drive root-cause when issues arise.
• Stand up NPI and production lines at contract manufacturers: process definition, work instructions, operator training, line balancing, yield ramp, and initial ramp.
• Be the point person for supplier communication, ECOs, deviation management, and Jira/issue-tracking hygiene.
• Modify and improve existing designs with testing/DFM feedback; draw-ready CAD changes and push through revision control.
• Collaborate with design engineers, test engineers, TPM, and cross-functional partners in supply chain, quality, and manufacturing engineering.
• Drive first-article builds and pilot runs, on the line, closing the loop with the design team.
• Travel to suppliers and manufacturing partners internationally.
• Bring high-volume production perspective into design reviews early—advocate for scalable, producible choices.

Skills

NPI experience

CAD fluency (Siemens NX)

GD&T

Supplier engagement

Full product lifecycle

Line bring-up

Travel willingness

Education

BS or MS in Mechanical Engineering or Mechatronics

Tools

Siemens NX

Creo

CATIA

SolidWorks

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 Zipline

Do you want to change the world? Zipline is on a mission to transform the way goods move. Our aim is to solve the world's most urgent and complex access challenges by building, manufacturing, and operating the first instant delivery and logistics system that serves all humans equally, wherever they are. From powering Rwanda's national blood delivery network and Ghana's COVID-19 vaccine distribution, to providing on-demand home delivery for Cleveland Clinic, Walmart, Chipotle, and Wendy's, we are transforming the way things move for businesses, governments, and consumers.

We've completed over 2.5 million commercial deliveries across seven countries and flown more than 120 million autonomous miles. Half a million households In 2026 we're scaling hard: new US metros, thousands of new vehicles in production, and a rapidly growing customer base ordering from us multiple times a day.

Join Zipline and help us make good on our promise to build an equitable and more resilient global supply chain for billions of people.

About You and the Role

The droid is the delivery container at the heart of our delivery system. It is the part that detaches from the aircraft, descends 300 feet on a tether, and places your order on a driveway. It is also the part of Zipline that our customers actually see and interact most closely with, which makes it one of the most demanding products we build. Every droid has to be beautiful, cheap, quiet, weatherproof, safe, and reliable for tens of thousands of flights.

We're designing EV3, the next generation of the droid. Between now and full-rate production, dozens of subsystems will go from concept to CAD to prototype to qualification to tooling to first article to production line. Every one of them has to be pushed through that funnel by someone who cares enough to make it happen, and who understands what "done" looks like at each phase.

That's what this role is. You'll take subsystems from various stages of completion (some at the concept stage and some almost ready to be DFM’d), and you'll drive them the rest of the way - through DVT, PVT, tooling release, first-article inspection, working with our manufacturing team to facilitate line bring-up, and the ramp itself. Along the way you'll own the test campaigns that qualify those subsystems, working with our SIE team to establish production and NPI lines at our contract manufacturers, and to manage the Jira queue, the ECOs, the supplier communication, and the schedule alongside our TPMs.

We're not looking for the next zero-to-one mechanical designer for this role. We're looking for someone who takes a design and runs with it. Someone who shoulders execution burden willingly, who is happiest when a hundred loose ends need to be tied off, and who has the judgment to know when to push a design forward and when to send it back to the drawing board.

You’ll join a small, deeply cross-disciplinary hardware team building EV3 Droid end-to-end.

What You'll Do

• Take droid subsystems from the design phase through DVT, PVT, tooling release, first-article, and full-rate production, owning the execution end-to-end.
• Own test campaigns for the subsystems you drive. That will involve writing test plans, coordinating fixtures, running the campaigns, and driving root-cause when things fail.
• Stand up NPI and production lines at our contract manufacturers. So - process definition, work instructions, operator training, line balancing, yield ramp, and the first weeks of full-rate production.
• Be the point person for supplier communication, ECOs, deviation management, and the Jira / issue-tracking hygiene that keeps a hardware program from drowning in itself.
• Modify and improve existing designs where testing, DFM, or production reveals opportunities. You don't need to do ground-up mechanism design, but you do need to be fluent enough in CAD (we use Siemens NX) to make competent, drawing-ready changes and drive them through revision control.
• Partner directly with the design engineers, test engineers, and the TPM on our team, and with cross-functional partners in supply chain, quality, and manufacturing engineering.
• Drive first-article builds and pilot runs, being physically present on the line, catching problems the drawings didn't anticipate, and closing the loop with the design team.
• Travel to suppliers and manufacturing partners in China, Malaysia, Japan, Italy, Germany, and Vietnam.
• Bring the perspective of higher-volume production into design reviews early - pushing back on choices that will hurt at scale, and championing choices that make the product easier to build and repair.

What You’ll Bring

• BS or MS in Mechanical Engineering, Mechatronics, or a related field, with 5+ years of hands‑on experience delivering physical products from design through production.
• A track record of taking mechanical designs through the full NPI cycle - DVT, PVT, tooling release, first article, and ramp -on at least one product program.
• Direct experience running or heavily contributing to test campaigns for mechanical or electromechanical hardware.
• CAD fluency sufficient to make competent, drawing-ready changes to complex assemblies (we use Siemens NX; strong Creo, CATIA, or SolidWorks experience is considered equivalent).
• Comfortable with GD&T, tolerance analysis, and reading and marking up production drawings.
• Practical, hands‑on knowledge of some or all of the manufacturing methods we use: injection molding, thermoplastic and thermoset composites, EPP foam molding, stamping, CNC machining and what it takes to actually get parts out of them at rate.
• Strong instincts for supplier engagement - you know how to run a good FAI review, how to elevate cleanly, and how to build the kind of working relationship with a CM that delivers functional and performant parts, on time and fully productionized.
• A willingness to travel internationally, sometimes on short notice.
• The kind of ownership mindset that treats the program's success as your personal responsibility.

Bonus points for any of the following:

• Prior experience at an automotive OEM, a drone or robotics company, a medical device company, or another high‑mix / high‑reliability hardware environment.
• Experience setting up N