Senior Systems Engineer

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

Job summary

Zipline in South San Francisco is seeking a Senior Systems Engineer to design, test, and deploy complex electromechanical systems for safety‑critical applications. You will own requirements, interfaces, and verification across cross‑disciplinary teams, helping scale operations and ensure reliability in real‑world field deployments.

You’ll lead trade studies, define system architectures, and collaborate with design, certification, and operations teams to demonstrate flight worthiness and

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or master's degree in a relevant engineering field.
• Experience designing safety‑critical electromechanical systems.
• Proven ability to solve complex multidisciplinary problems on schedule.

Responsibilities

• Serve as a trusted technical expert for deploying high‑reliability autonomous systems in safety‑critical environments.
• Own system and subsystem requirements, decomposition, and traceability.
• Define interfaces and drive cross‑disciplinary discussions to align on budgets.
• Develop trade studies to optimize performance, safety, and cost for architecture decisions.
• Evaluate hardware and software release standards and test requirements.
• Partner with design, other systems engineers and certification teams to prove flight worthiness to regulators.

Skills

Aerospace Engineering

Systems Engineering

Safety critical systems

Problem solving

Modeling tools

Statistical analysis

Flight dynamics

Energy budgets

Fault tolerant systems

Education

Aerospace or Systems Engineering degree

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

We’re looking for a Senior Systems Engineer to join our team who has developed, tested, and deployed complex electromechanical systems into safety critical environments. Do you enjoy tackling the most cross‑disciplinary parts of a complex program? Do you thrive in solving business‑critical problems with little direction, a high degree of ownership, and the freedom to make it happen? At Zipline our work is intended for the field. Patients are counting on it today--there is no time for coming up short. If being an engineering leader on the team driving us to achieve our ambitious goals to scale operations and production, improve reliability, level‑up our customer experience, and efficiently mature our processes to support all of this appeals to you, read on.

Zipline was founded by engineers dedicated to making the world a better place. We are scaling around the world and we need someone to join our team who is excited to help level up Systems Engineering at Zipline. Every day, your commitment and technical leadership will help save lives.

What You’ll Do

• Serve as a trusted technical expert of deploying high‑reliability, autonomous systems into safety‑critical environments including owning requirements, metrics, test coverage, and validation processes to ensure we ship safe and robust systems
• Own system and subsystem requirement definition, decomposition, and traceability
• Define interfaces and drive cross disciplinary discussions to align on budgets
• Develop frameworks and facilitate trade studies to optimize for performance, safety, and cost across key system architecture or operations decisions
• Evaluate hardware and software release standards and test requirements
• Partner with design engineering, other systems engineers and certification team to prove flight worthiness to regulators

What You’ll Bring

• BS and/or MS in Aerospace Engineering, Systems Engineering or related field
• 5+ years of real‑world experience in safety critical electromechanical systems, for example in autonomous vehicles, aerospace, or industrial automation fields including systems/vehicle design experience
• Ability to solve complex multidisciplinary problems on schedule independently
• The ability to dive in when appropriate to solve problems using tools such as your modeling language/tool of choice, systems modeling, and statistical analysis among others
• Knowledge from designing systems that were resilient to harsh climatic environments, mechanical vibration, ESD, and/or high electrical noise
• Experience with not only fail‑safe fault tolerant modes but also fail‑operative modes that enable the system to continue to operate through faults
• Sufficiently comfortable with energy budgets, flight dynamics, and statistical analysis methods to set the appropriate risk‑based thresholds for things like energy margins and environmental limitations
• Ideally, you’ll also have a proven track record setting up systems engineering processes in new projects and/or startup environments such as implementing requirements including processes, definition, decomposition, and verification

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. If you like the sound of this position but are not sure if you are the perfect fit, please apply!