- Robot type
- Drone
- Location
- South San FranciscoCaliforniaUSA
- Job type
- Hardware
- Posted
- Aug 13, 2026
- Salary
- $135,000–$225,000 a year
Mechanical Design Engineer - Droid SMI
Job description
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…
Job responsibilities
- Own subsystems of the droid end-to-end, from architecture, detailed design, prototyping, validation, DFM, tooling, and production ramp.
- Partner directly with our industrial design team to translate ID intent into engineered product - surfacing, split lines, materials, finishes, color, tactile feel.
- Define and negotiate requirements for your subsystems, working with systems engineering, operations, and cross-functional hardware leads to make sure what you build is what the product actually needs.
- Design in CAD (we use Siemens NX) with the fluency to iterate through architectures and designs quickly.
- Use hand calcs, FEA, clean first-principles thinking and prototyping to bound problems, size parts, and down select between options.
- Design the test fixtures, assembly aids, and inspection tooling that your subsystem needs to be built and validated at rate, while partnering closely with our test engineering team on life-test rigs and end-of-line…
- Drive parts, assemblies, and BOMs through release, revision control, and change management with the discipline that a product at scale demands.
- Work closely with our electrical, firmware, thermal, and manufacturing engineers to make sure the mechanical design is tightly-integrated within our system.
Similar jobs
Zipline · Hardware
Senior Loads and Dynamics Engineer - Aeroelastics and Rotordynamics
South San Francisco, California
Zipline · Hardware
Flight Test Electrical Lead
Esparto, California · South San Francisco, California
Zipline · Hardware
Electrical Project Engineer Intern (Summer 2027)
South San Francisco, California
Zipline · Hardware
Senior/Staff Systems Modeling Engineer, Electric Propulsion
South San Francisco, California
