Mechanical & Scaling Engineer, Droid

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 earlier - 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 escalate 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 NPI or production lines at a Chinese, Malaysian, or Vietnamese contract manufacturer.
• Test rig design experience -instrumentation, DAQ, fixture design for cyclic and environmental testing.
• Familiarity with the electrical and firmware side of the products you've integrated.
• Prior experience owning ECO, PLM, or JIRA workflows for a hardware program of nontrivial complexity.

What Else You Need to Know

The starting cash range for this role is $175,000 – $215,000 depending on experience. This is a target starting range for a candidate who meets the minimum qualifications; the final cash offer will depend on experience, qualifications, skills, working location, and projected impact. The total compensation package for this role also includes equity compensation and benefits (medical, dental, vision, PTO, and more).

Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, mental or physical disability, medical condition, genetic information, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, military or veteran status, citizenship, or other characteristics protected by state, federal, or local law.

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 aren't sure you're the perfect fit -please apply anyway.