New Products Mechanical Design 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 The New Products team invents Zipline’s next generation of systems.

We’re looking for exceptional mechanical designers to develop the lightweight structures and precision mechanisms that enable entirely new aircraft capabilities. You thrive in ambiguity and enjoy creating hardware that has never existed before. Whether your expertise is in composite structures, mechanisms, or both, you combine strong engineering fundamentals with a hands-on approach to rapidly turn ideas into reliable hardware.

You are comfortable moving between concept generation, analysis, CAD, prototyping, testing, and manufacturing, always balancing performance, weight, reliability, manufacturability, cost, and schedule. You have a track record of solving difficult engineering problems through first-principles thinking, rapid experimentation, and sound technical judgment.

What You'Ll Do

Own end-to-end mechanical subsystem delivery for assigned scope (examples: wing/centerbody structure, landing/release mechanisms, payload bay interfaces, or actuation systems) from concept through production release and field deployment.

Requirements

(mass budget, MTBF targets, operational duty cycles, environmental exposure, and turnaround time) into concrete designs, CAD, tolerance stacks, and verification plans. Produce and release drawings, GD&T, BOMs, and supplier specifications; coordinate part qualification, change control, and supplier handoffs to manufacturing partners. Drive test campaigns: design test fixtures, lead lab and flight-test instrumentation, execute structural and mechanism validation, collect data, and close failure modes against defined acceptance criteria.

Use first-principles analysis and FEA to set margins, predict loads and fatigue life, and iterate designs to meet quantified targets (mass, stiffness, life, and safety factors). Rapidly prototype and iterate in-shop: build assemblies, lead bench and environmental tests, and convert validated prototypes into producible designs with documented producibility improvements. Collaborate daily with aerodynamics, structures, controls/autonomy, flight test, manufacturing, and operations teams; own cross-functional tradeoffs and be the mechanical authority in design reviews.