Sr/Staff System Test and Validation 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
System Test is a ultra-fast-pace team responsible for pathfinding new hardware and delivering on environmental and durability campaigns for zipline’s major hardware categories. The direct team is small and lightweight, and interacts with most departments at Zipline. You will be a technical leader in the small, special-ops team of test engineers and technicians across environmental, durability, and replicated-flight testing. You will own the system-test roadmap for reliability validation and rapid fault finding, and develop hardware and software to replicate in-flight stresses and to monitor the vehicle. The algorithms used for failure-detection can also be deployed to the fleet for fleet-wide monitoring.
This team, and the fast discovery of hardware faults, is core to the success of Zipline and the velocity of hardware development and deployment.
What You'll Do
- Develop novel ways of replicating in-flight environments on the ground, including external factors (dust, ingress, icing), and internal vehicle stresses.
- Deeply understand the vehicle DFMEA and own the vehicle actuation during system test.
- Translate mission profiles into qualification and life-test plans, including accelerated test design, stress levels, and sample size justification. Stay ahead of aircraft profiles and load curves, to help unlock new capability.
- Develop health monitoring and anomaly detection software (Python, Rust) for aircraft and robotic systems, with emphasis on using the vehicle’s on-board telemetry.
- Drive the ‘rapid failure finding’ branch of the system test campaigns, a core input to design cycles and achieving maintenance goals.
- Build data pipelines and automated analysis tooling to adapt flight-software validators for system tests.
- Drive or develop directly the features needed in flight code to enable ‘Test Mode’ functionality.
- Integrate off-board sensors (cameras, airspeed sensors, other instrumentation) for continuous monitoring of vehicle health and tester health during long-duration tests.
- Conduct characterization of test assets, including developing analytical models and running instrumented test campaigns, to correlate test conditions to flight.
- Drive decisions about test strategy overall: what new features are needed in system test, what should be tested at the system-level vs. component level vs. flight test. How to bring more coverage into system tests, and ways of rapid failure-finding.
- Collaborate with the Reliability team to hone the strategy of long-duration vs. multiple vehicles being tested, as a function of the part-to-part variability and overall CapEx strategy.
What You'll Bring
- Demonstrated experience leading test engineers, equipment designers, and technicians for complex hardware programs.
- Experience planning and running environmental, durability, and reliability test campaigns that inform engineering decisions.
- Experience in reliability techniques including MTBF, Weibull analyses, and DFMEAs.
- Strong electromechanical skills in embedded controls, real-time compute, and actuation.
- Software proficiency (Python, Rust, C/C++)
- Electrical engineering fundamentals including battery systems, communications protocols, and RF systems.
- Strong hardware-debugging intuition and electrical troubleshooting skills for aircraft or similarly complex electromechanical systems.- Sound judgment to prioritize test capability, campaign scope, and fault investigations across multiple hardware programs.
- Excellent ability to ‘get unstuck’ and make progress in a complex and changing environment.
- Experience developing real-time controls in safety critical applications.
What Else You Need To Know
The starting salary for this role is $165,000 - $230,000. 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.