Controls Engineer Intern (Summer 2027)

As a Controls Engineer Intern at Zipline, you will work on the Flight Controls team, contributing to the design and implementation of flight algorithms for autonomous aircraft. This role involves analyzing flight data, developing simulation tools, and presenting your findings to improve operational performance.

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.

About the Flight Controls Team

Our Flight Controls team is at the heart of Zipline’s product success - we are responsible for developing, testing and maintaining some of the critical flight software systems that enable our aircraft to complete missions autonomously.

What You'll Do

• Contribute to the design, implementation, testing and release of innovative flight algorithms that improve the operational performance of our vehicle controllers.
• Create tools and tests to demonstrate your design performance and protect against software regressions.
• Develop and improve simulation and other controls analysis tools.
• Analyze flight data to assess recent changes and upgrades.
• Design onboard integrity tests to communicate when the system performance is degraded.
• Present key results and changes to the broader engineering team.

What You'll Bring

• Your applied math skills stand out even among aerospace engineers.
• You think simulations and working with hardware are both fun.