Lead Production Equipment & Tooling 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.

About You And The Role

We are looking for a Lead Production Equipment & Tooling Design Engineer to design the fixtures, workstations, assembly tooling, and production equipment used to build Zipline products at scale. This role is focused on hardware for the factory floor, with a mix of technical ownership and people leadership. You will lead a small group of equipment and tooling design engineers while remaining deeply hands-on in the work. This role is expected to be approximately 75% individual contributor and 25% leadership, with responsibility for both delivering critical tooling and equipment projects yourself and helping guide the team’s priorities, quality, and execution.

What You’ll Bring

• 5+ years of experience designing manufacturing equipment, tooling, or fixtures in a production environment.
• Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering or a related field.
• Strong mechanical design skills, including GD&T, tolerance stack-up, mechanism design, and material/process selection.
• Proficiency in 3D CAD; Siemens NX preferred.
• Experience designing and releasing custom tooling for repeatable assembly of electro-mechanical products.
• Hands-on experience supporting fabrication, build, debug, and commissioning of production equipment.
• Familiarity with common factory hardware such as pneumatics, sensors, actuators, linear motion, and machine guarding.
• Understanding of DFM/DFA, ergonomics, poka-yoke, and operator-centered tooling design.
• Experience working cross-functionally with design, quality, technicians, and vendors in a fast-paced environment.
• Strong judgment, ownership, and willingness to spend time on the manufacturing floor solving problems.