Sr/Staff System Test and Validation Engineer

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.
• 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.