Industrial & Operations Engineer
Zipline · San Francisco, United States · 1mo ago
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 an Industrial & Operations Engineer on the Manufacturing Engineering team, you will own factory performance and scaling.
You will take a factory-level view of production—connecting demand, labor, equipment, space, material flow, process capability, and capital investment into an integrated production system. Your job is to understand how the factory performs today, identify what will constrain us tomorrow, and design the systems required to scale.
This is not a reporting or planning-only role. You will spend time on the production floor observing how work actually happens, use data to identify constraints and opportunities, and then drive changes to layouts, staffing models, processes, buffers, equipment, and operating strategies.
You will help answer fundamental questions such as: How much can we build? What is preventing us from building more? What will break as demand increases? Where should we add people, equipment, automation, or space? And what should the factory look like at the next order of magnitude of production?
What You'll Do
- Own factory-level performance, scalability, and production system design, connecting individual manufacturing processes into an efficient end-to-end production system.
- Develop and continuously improve factory and line layouts, optimizing workstation design, material presentation, operator movement, equipment placement, and overall material flow.
- Lead time studies, cycle-time analysis, labor modeling, and line balancing to establish production standards and improve labor efficiency.
- Build and maintain capacity models that translate demand forecasts into requirements for labor, equipment, tooling, shifts, floor space, and capital.
- Identify current and future production bottlenecks, quantify their impact, and lead changes that increase throughput and factory utilization.
- Define WIP, buffer, queue, and rework strategies that protect production output while minimizing excess inventory and lead time.
- Develop scalable operating strategies for products moving from prototype and pilot production into sustained higher-rate manufacturing.
- Translate production targets into clear factory requirements and actionable scaling plans.
- Partner with Manufacturing Engineers and Production teams to define takt time, staffing models, station loading, standard work, and production-line architecture.
- Use production data to identify opportunities to improve throughput, cycle time, labor efficiency, utilization, WIP, and cost.
- Develop scenarios for future demand and identify capacity constraints before they impact production.
- Lead analysis supporting make-versus-buy decisions, including manufacturing cost, capital requirements, labor, capacity, quality, flexibility, and scaling risk.
- Build business cases and ROI analyses for automation, equipment, tooling, facility expansion, and other CapEx investments.
- Evaluate where automation meaningfully improves the production system versus where simpler process, tooling, or workflow improvements provide better returns.
- Partner with Supply Chain and Material Planning to improve lineside material availability, replenishment strategies, inventory placement, and production flow.
- Establish factory-level KPIs and operating mechanisms that make performance visible and enable teams to identify and correct deviations quickly.
- Create models, dashboards, and decision-making tools that allow Manufacturing and Operations leaders to make data-driven scaling decisions.
- Drive continuous improvement projects from problem definition through implementation and measurable production impact.
What You'll Bring
- Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering, Manufacturing Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Operations Research, Systems Engineering, or a related technical field.
- 3+ years of experience in industrial engineering, manufacturing engineering, operations engineering, production systems, or a comparable environment.
- Strong understanding of production system design, capacity planning, line balancing, takt time, cycle-time analysis, standard work, and manufacturing flow.
- Demonstrated experience performing time studies and translating observations into labor and capacity models.
- Experience designing or improving manufacturing layouts and material-flow systems.
- Strong analytical skills and the ability to turn imperfect production data into clear engineering and business decisions.
- Experience identifying manufacturing constraints and driving improvements in throughput, productivity, utilization, lead time, or cost.
- Ability to build financial and operational models that support CapEx, automation, make/buy, and factory-scaling decisions.
- Strong spreadsheet and data-analysis skills; comfort working with manufacturing data from ERP, MES, labor-tracking, and production systems.
- Ability to work directly on the factory floor, understand how production actually operates, and collaborate effectively with technicians, manufacturing engineers, production leaders, quality engineers, supply chain, and design engineering.
- Strong communication skills and the ability to convert complex analysis into simple recommendations and executable plans.
- A high degree of ownership. You are comfortable identifying an ambiguous factory-level problem, defining what needs to be measured, developing a solution, and driving it through implementation.
Nice to Have
- Experience scaling a complex electromechanical product from NPI or low-rate production into higher-volume manufacturing.
- Experience with discrete-event simulation, optimization, operations research, or other production-system modeling techniques.
- Experience with SQL, Python, BI tools, or other methods for analyzing large manufacturing datasets.
- Experience with ERP and MES platforms and developing manufacturing dashboards or operational reporting systems.
- Experience developing business cases for automation or major manufacturing equipment.
- Experience with Lean manufacturing concepts, Theory of Constraints, PFMEA, value-stream mapping, or structured continuous-improvement methodologies.
- Experience supporting factory expansions, new production lines, or greenfield manufacturing operations.
What Success Looks Like
You will be successful when Zipline can confidently answer, with data:
- What is our true production capacity?
- What is constraining output today?
- What will constrain us at the next level of demand?
- How many people, stations, shifts, and pieces of equipment do we need?
- Where should we invest capital—and where shouldn't we?
- How should material, WIP, and rework flow through the factory?
- What changes will produce the largest improvement in throughput, efficiency, and cost?
Ultimately, you will build the production system that allows Zipline’s Manufacturing Engineering organization to move from reacting to factory constraints to anticipating them—and to scale production deliberately, efficiently, and repeatably.
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!
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.