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Senior Mechanical Hardware Reliability Engineer

South San Francisco, California, USA

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 

As a Senior Mechanical Hardware Reliability Engineer, you will own the reliability of critical mechanical and electromechanical systems across Zipline’s autonomous delivery platform. Your primary scope may include systems such as our next-generation delivery Dropbox or delivery pod, with opportunities to own other mechanical systems depending on your experience and background. 

You’ll work at both the system and component level: defining what reliability needs to mean for products operating at massive scale, identifying the failure modes that matter most, influencing architecture and design, and determining how we should validate that hardware is ready to deploy. For systems where reliability is driven as much by unit economics, availability, and maintenance burden as by safety, you’ll help establish the appropriate reliability targets and release criteria rather than simply executing against an existing specification. 

You’ll combine strong mechanical engineering fundamentals, hands-on failure investigation, Design-for-Reliability, Physics-of-Failure, and statistical methods to uncover risks early and drive them to resolution. This role requires a high degree of technical ownership and judgment: you’ll be expected to independently identify where deeper investigation will have the greatest impact and work across design, test, manufacturing, quality, and operations to deliver hardware capable of long service lives at scale. 

What You'll Do

  • Own the reliability strategy for mission-critical mechanical subsystems or entire systems, such as the Dropbox or delivery pod, applying Design-for-Reliability (DfR) and Physics-of-Failure (PoF) principles.
  • Define system reliability targets, life requirements, and release criteria based on safety, availability, unit economics, operational burden, and the maturity of the program. Translate these targets into design-level requirements, verification plans, and objective pass/fail criteria.
  • Lead system- and component-level FMEAs to identify the highest-value reliability risks, influence architecture and design decisions, and prioritize where deeper analysis or testing is needed. 
  • Develop Accelerated Life Testing (ALT) and environmental test campaigns that efficiently demonstrate long-term performance, including determining how to revalidate systems as designs evolve. 
  • Lead complex test failures and field issues from initial triage through root cause, risk assessment, and corrective action, including making technically grounded recommendations about hardware readiness and release. 
  • Sign off on test verification results and assess hardware readiness for flight from a reliability standpoint.
  • Define operational life limits and service intervals using a combination of test data, field returns, and statistical models.
  • Provide clear technical direction in ambiguous situations, balancing reliability risk against schedule, resources, cost, and operational impact. 
  • Improve Zipline’s reliability methods, tools, standards, and decision-making processes as the company scales.

What You'll Bring

  • B.S. or M.S. in Mechanical Engineering, Materials Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
  • 5+ years of relevant engineering experience developing and validating safety-critical electromechanical systems through delivery to customers.
  • Strong mechanical engineering fundamentals and the ability to reason from first principles about hardware behavior and failure.
  • Experience owning technically complex hardware at the subsystem or system level and independently driving ambiguous problems from risk identification through resolution. 
  • Experience applying reliability methods such as DFMEA, accelerated-life testing, environmental testing, failure analysis, or life modeling.
  • Demonstrated ability to identify the dominant risks in a complex system, prioritize limited engineering and test resources, and determine when sufficient evidence exists to support a design or release decision. 
  • Strong technical communication skills, including the ability to:
    • explain complex technical issues clearly;
    • synthesize ambiguous information into a coherent problem statement; 
    • write concise, decision-oriented technical documentation; and
    • drive cross-functional alignment on reliability trade-offs and technical decisions around design, supply-chain, quality, manufacturing, finance, and operations.
  • Demonstrated ownership and practical problem-solving ability, including driving technically complex issues through resolution.
  • Ability to independently develop new technical depth and move fluidly between system-level reliability questions and detailed component-level investigations. 

Experience with mechanisms, robotics, long-life mechanical systems, highly utilized products, or hardware designed for minimal maintenance is especially valuable. Experience spanning both mechanical and electrical aspects of electromechanical systems is a plus. 

What Else You Need To Know

The starting cash range for this role is $140,000-$180,000. Please note that this is a target, starting cash range for a candidate who meets the minimum qualifications for this role. The final cash pay for this role will depend on a variety of factors, including a specific candidate's experience, qualifications, skills, working location, and projected impact. The total compensation package for this role may also include: equity compensation; discretionary annual or performance bonuses; sales incentives; benefits such as medical, dental and vision insurance; paid time off; and more. 

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!

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.

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