Senior Motor Dyno 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
Zipline is looking for a Senior Motor Dyno Engineer to design, build, commission, and own electric-motor dynamometer systems used across motor development, supplier quality, and reliability validation.
In this role, you will develop dynos with distinct technical objectives. Characterization dynos will use high-accuracy instrumentation to generate trusted motor-performance data and correlate electromagnetic, thermal, and system models. Inspection dynos will provide robust, repeatable measurements that can be deployed at motor suppliers to assess outgoing quality. Durability dynos will reproduce application-representative mechanical, electrical, and thermal loads to quantify motor life and identify failure mechanisms.
You will be responsible for the complete test-system lifecycle, from defining requirements and selecting hardware through mechanical and electrical integration, CAD ownership, controls development, data acquisition, safety systems, commissioning, and sustained operation. You will work closely with motor design, reliability, power electronics, controls, mechanical, thermal, systems, manufacturing, and supplier-quality engineers.
The ideal candidate combines hands-on electromechanical integration experience with strong test engineering fundamentals, software capability, and the judgment required to create test systems that are accurate, reliable, safe, and easy to operate.
What You’ll Do
- Define requirements and architectures for motor characterization, inspection, and durability dynamometers.
- Design, build, commission, and maintain dyno systems for propulsion and auxiliary motors.
- Select and integrate motors, load machines, inverters, torque transducers, speed sensors, power analyzers, thermal instrumentation, cooling systems, fixtures, and data-acquisition hardware.
- Develop mechanical interfaces, shafting, couplings, guarding, alignment strategies, and structural systems for safe and accurate testing.
- Design electro-mechanical systems including low-voltage power distribution, grounding, shielding, interlocks, emergency stops, and fault protection.
- Develop automated test sequences, supervisory controls, data acquisition, and post-processing tools using Python and related software platforms.
- Establish a common user interface and software architecture across Zipline’s motor-dyno ecosystem, including standardized data access, test-profile programming, reusable test-profile libraries, and common workflows across new and existing dynos.
- Build shared tools that allow engineers to discover, configure, execute, and analyze dyno tests consistently without requiring dyno-specific knowledge or bespoke workflows.
- Generate motor maps and test datasets used to validate electromagnetic, thermal, controls, and system-level models.
- Develop supplier-deployable inspection dynos with repeatable test procedures, clear pass/fail metrics, and appropriate measurement controls.
- Design and build test systems that reproduce application-representative torque, speed, electrical, thermal, vibration, and transient-load profiles.
- Develop operating procedures, maintenance plans, commissioning documentation, and safety reviews.
- Improve dyno utilization, test throughput, data quality, and operational reliability through automation and standardization.
- Provide technical guidance to international/domestic suppliers, other engineers, and technicians as well as serve as a subject-matter expert for electric-motor testing.
What You’ll Bring
- Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, mechatronics, controls engineering, or a related field.
- Experience designing, commissioning, or operating electric-motor, powertrain, or rotating-equipment dynamometers.
- Demonstrated ownership of complex test systems from initial requirements through hardware bring-up and sustained operation.
- Strong electromechanical integration skills across mechanical hardware, electrical systems, instrumentation, controls, and software.
- Experience selecting and integrating torque transducers, encoders, power analyzers, thermocouples, RTDs, vibration sensors, and data-acquisition systems.
- Proficiency in Python for test automation, instrument control, data processing, analysis, and visualization.
- Experience with industrial communication protocols and instrument interfaces such as CAN, EtherCAT, Ethernet/IP, Modbus, serial, or SCPI.
- Strong understanding of electric motors, inverters, torque-speed operation, efficiency measurement, thermal behavior, and common motor failure modes.
- Experience with closed-loop speed, torque, current, or power control of motor-test systems.
- Knowledge of test measurement accuracy, calibration, repeatability, uncertainty, and measurement-system analysis.
- Experience designing safe test systems involving rotating equipment, high voltage, high current, stored energy, and thermal hazards.
- Strong troubleshooting skills and the ability to diagnose interactions between hardware, software, controls, and instrumentation.
- Ability to communicate clearly through test specifications, schematics, procedures, reports, and design reviews.
- Ability to work effectively in a hands-on development environment and support test systems on the lab floor.
Nice to Have
- Master’s degree in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, mechatronics, controls, or a related discipline.
- Experience developing dynos for aerospace, electric aviation, automotive traction, robotics, or other high-performance electric-drive applications.
- Experience with National Instruments hardware, LabVIEW, MATLAB, Simulink, dSPACE, Speedgoat, or real-time control systems.
- Experience with high-accuracy motor characterization, including efficiency mapping, loss separation, back-EMF measurement, cogging torque, torque ripple, and thermal characterization.
- Experience with motor NVH characterization and diagnostics, including vibration and acoustic measurements, spectral analysis, FFTs, order tracking and extraction, and identification of speed- and load-dependent excitation mechanisms.
- Familiarity with signal-processing workflows for rotating machinery and experience correlating measured frequency content with motor electrical orders, mechanical orders, and structural resonances.
- Experience with reliability engineering, accelerated life testing, Weibull analysis, damage accumulation, and failure-mode-based test development.
- Familiarity with vibration, noise, rotor dynamics, bearing analysis, and high-speed rotating equipment.
- Experience translating duty-cycle or field-load data into representative laboratory tests.
- Experience developing production or supplier quality test equipment, including gauge R&R, golden units, limit setting, and test-system correlation.
- Experience working with motor suppliers or deploying test equipment into supplier facilities.
- Familiarity with inverter calibration, motor controls, regenerative power systems, battery emulators, and DC power supplies.
- Experience with CAD, tolerance analysis, shaft alignment, fixture design, and rotating-equipment balancing.
- Familiarity with functional safety, machinery safety, and laboratory electrical-safety standards.
What Else You Need to Know
Within your first year, you will have designed reliable motor-dyno capabilities that provide trusted data across characterization, supplier inspection, and durability testing.
Motor design and modeling teams will use your characterization data to improve model correlation and make better engineering decisions. Supplier-quality teams will have repeatable inspection methods that detect meaningful variation before motors enter aircraft production. Reliability teams will have application-representative durability tests that reveal failure mechanisms and improve confidence in motor life.
Your work will shorten development cycles, improve data quality, increase test throughput, and help ensure that every motor used across Zipline’s aircraft meets its performance and reliability requirements.
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.