Senior Propulsion & Motor Test Engineer

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

Job summary

Zipline in South San Francisco, CA seeks a Senior Motor Test Engineer to characterize motors, propulsion, actuators, and subassemblies in the lab and connect results to flight and field performance.

You will own performance and reliability test campaigns from specification through technical recommendation, informing design release, vehicle readiness, field reliability, model validation, and production-test decisions.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with electric motors and actuators, including efficiency characterization, losses evaluation, testing to evaluate electrical and thermal models.
• Hands-on experience with actuator performance and control system evaluation.
• Hands-on experience with structural and dynamics performance, including material testing, dynamic response, accelerometer and strain instrumentation.
• Experience building or improving test fixtures, dynamometers, thrust stands, instrumentation, or automated data-acquisition systems.
• Proficiency in Python or equivalent.
• Sound engineering judgment to connect test results to design decisions, model validation, reliability risks, and field performance.
• Experience working across hardware design and manufacturing teams to translate test evidence into practical product and production changes.

Responsibilities

• Conduct full electromechanical characterization of BLDC motors including loss characterization, thermal coefficient extraction, and demagnetization testing
• Evaluate propulsion systems (motor + inverter + propeller) for thrust, efficiency, and thermal behavior across the full operational envelope
• Test servo and motor-based actuators for positional accuracy, losses, holding torque, and closed-loop dynamic response
• Define and own test specifications covering efficiency maps, thermal performance, torque-speed curves, cogging, back-EMF, and endurance
• Perform root cause analysis on field failures and correlate back to test data to close the loop between lab and flight
• Own the full performance and reliability test campaign for your hardware – you are the go-to person to understand how a part will perform in the field, and when the hardware is pushed to its limits.
• Characterize wear-out mechanisms for complex actuator and propeller subassemblies, subject to billions of damage cycles per lifetime.
• Develop novel ways for validating motor and structural models and FEA validation.
• Partner with mechanical, electrical, and firmware engineers to translate design intent into rigorous test requirements
• Work with manufacturing to develop production test strategies that balance coverage, throughput, and cost
• Develop automated test scripts and data acquisition pipelines (Python, or equivalent)

Skills

Electric motors & actuators

Test & measurement methods

Python programming

Engineering judgment

Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

Dynamometers

Thrust stands

Data acquisition systems

Python

Job description

Zipline in South San Francisco, CA seeks a Senior Motor Test Engineer to characterize motors, propulsion, actuators, and subassemblies in the lab and connect results to flight and field performance.

You will own performance and reliability test campaigns from specification through technical recommendation, informing design release, vehicle readiness, field reliability, model validation, and production-test decisions.