Senior CAE Engineer - Crash Safety and Powertrain Analysis

Job description

Job responsibilities

• Own Zipline's crash safety analysis strategy for full-vehicle and component-level events; define load cases, failure modes, analysis methods, acceptance criteria, and reporting standards.
• Design and develop custom mechanical test equipment supporting impact, crush, penetration, drop, abuse, fire, vibration, and structural testing of batteries and aircraft hardware.
• Build and execute nonlinear explicit-dynamics models for aircraft and component crash, impact, drop, crush, penetration, and abuse events.
• Translate analysis results into design changes that improve containment, isolation, damage tolerance, and safe post-crash behavior.
• Own durability analysis for powertrain components including busbars, motors, batteries, mounts, and supporting structures.
• Develop rapid first-principles studies and reduced-order models to guide design trades before committing to detailed simulation. Deliver clear engineering guidance quickly as aircraft and component configurations evolve.
• Build and maintain vehicle-level and detailed finite element models with appropriate fidelity for global load paths, local stresses, nonlinear contact, material behavior, joints, interfaces, and failure modes.
• Plan analysis correlation with the test team: define pre-test predictions, instrumentation needs, data-processing methods, and post-test correlation workflows.