Lead Production Equipment Tooling Design Engineer

About the role

Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service. We deliver critical supplies quickly and reliably, serving all humans equally by ensuring access to food, medicine, and essential goods. Our customers include major healthcare systems, governments, retailers, restaurants, and global businesses. We operate on four continents, making a delivery every 30 seconds and completing millions of deliveries.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end delivery of production equipment and tooling projects for aircraft and electro-mechanical subsystems: requirements, CAD (Siemens NX), detailed drawings, vendor fab oversight, build, commissioning, and production release.
• Deliver measurable improvements: drive tooling availability to >95% Uptime, reduce manual assembly cycle time by 20–40% per station, and improve first-pass yield (FPY) on targeted assemblies by >=10% within the first 6–12 months of deployment.
• Design and install alignment fixtures, press and torque tooling, ergonomic operator stations, poka-yoke devices, handling/transport fixtures, and automated EOL test rigs tied to build and test specs for aircraft, battery packs, and docks.
• Lead on-line debugging and rapid root-cause analysis during launches and ramp phases; be prepared to run weekend or evening commissioning efforts during critical releases.
• Create and enforce tooling design standards, GD&T practices, tolerance stacks, and material/process selections that meet safety and maintainability requirements for autonomous hardware.
• Mentor and review work of 1–4 tooling engineers and technicians: set priorities, approve releases, run design reviews, and recruit/hire as required.
• Cook up cross-functionally with Design Engineering, Manufacturing, Quality, Supply Chain, Test Engineering, and Field Operations to align tooling scope, test requirements, and production schedules.
• Manage relationships with fabricators and vendors: write technical RFQs, evaluate proposals, verify vendor QC, and perform acceptance testing at build and after installation.

Requirements

• 5+ years designing production equipment, fixtures, or custom automation in a high-volume or fast-ramping manufacturing environment; experience with aerospace, drones, medical devices, or safety-critical electro-mechanical products is strongly preferred.
• Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering or equivalent practical experience.
• Demonstrated mastery of GD&T, tolerance analysis, mechanism design, material selection, and failure-mode thinking for assembly tooling.
• Proficiency in 3D CAD; Siemens NX preferred (SolidWorks/Creo experience acceptable with strong NX learning intent).
• Hands-on experience commissioning equipment on the factory floor: supporting fabrication, build, debug, test, and operator training; comfortable spending most of your week on-site.
• Practical knowledge of pneumatics, actuators, sensors, linear motion, machine guarding, and industrial electrical interfaces used in tooling and small automation.
• Track record delivering quantitative outcomes (cycle time, uptime, FPY, cost per unit) and making trade-offs between throughput, reliability, and maintainability.
• Ability to lead vendor builds and perform acceptance testing to technical drawings and QA criteria.
• Logistics: role is site-based at the specified South San Francisco plant; expect regular on-site presence during standard manufacturing shifts, availability for occasional off-hours commissioning, and up to 15% travel to vendor or field sites.

Qualifications

• Must-have traits: high ownership of safety and reliability, decisive technical judgment under schedule pressure, comfort with ambiguity and rapid iteration, and willingness to escalate and resolve issues that affect fleet readiness.