Sr/Staff System Test and Validation Engineer

About the role

Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service, serving all humans equally by ensuring access to food, medicine and essential goods anytime, anywhere. Zipline designs, builds, and operates the world’s largest autonomous logistics system, delivering critical supplies quickly and reliably. Operating on four continents, Zipline 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. Customers include the world’s largest healthcare systems, governments, retailers, restaurants and global businesses who rely on Zipline 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 Zipline has built to enable seamless, reliable, global operations. The 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. Zipline operates at a global scale and is looking for practical problem solvers who thrive on real‑world challenges and rapid growth. The team is motivated by building systems that have a direct, meaningful impact on people’s lives and by scaling the future of logistics. Zipline seeks people who sculpt from first principles, enjoy facing adversity, and can do the impossible at record‑breaking speeds. The System Test team is an ultra‑fast‑paced group responsible for pathfinding new hardware and delivering on environmental and durability campaigns for Zipline’s major hardware categories. The direct team is small and lightweight, interacting with most departments at Zipline. You will be a technical leader in the small, special‑ops team of test engineers and technicians across environmental, durability, and replicated‑flight testing. You will own the system‑test roadmap for reliability validation and rapid fault finding, and develop hardware and software to replicate in‑flight stresses and to monitor the vehicle. The algorithms used for failure‑detection can also be deployed to the fleet for fleet‑wide monitoring. This team, and the fast discovery of hardware faults, is core to the success of Zipline and the velocity of hardware development and deployment.

Responsibilities

• Develop novel ways of replicating in‑flight environments on the ground, including external factors (dust, ingress, icing), and internal vehicle stresses.
• Deeply understand the vehicle DFMEA and own the vehicle actuation during system test.
• Translate mission profiles into qualification and life‑test plans, including accelerated test design, stress levels, and sample size justification.
• Stay ahead of aircraft profiles and load curves, to help unlock new capability.
• Develop health monitoring and anomaly detection software (Python, Rust) for aircraft and robotic systems, with emphasis on using the vehicle’s on‑board telemetry.
• Drive the ‘rapid failure finding’ branch of the system test campaigns, a core input to design cycles and achieving maintenance goals.
• Build data pipelines and automated analysis tooling to adapt flight‑software validators for system tests.
• Drive or develop directly the features needed in flight code to enable ‘Test Mode’ functionality.
• Integrate off‑board sensors (cameras, airspeed sensors, other instrumentation) for continuous monitoring of vehicle health and tester health during long‑duration tests.
• Conduct characterization of test assets, including developing analytical models and running instrumented test campaigns, to correlate test conditions to flight.
• Drive decisions about test strategy overall: what new features are needed in system test, what should be tested at the system‑level vs. component level vs. flight test. How to bring more coverage into system tests, and ways of rapid failure‑finding.
• Collaborate with the Reliability team to hone the strategy of long‑duration vs. multiple vehicles being tested, as a function of the part‑to‑part variability and overall CapEx strategy.

Requirements

• Demonstrated experience leading test engineers, equipment designers, and technicians for complex hardware programs.
• Experience planning and running environmental, durability, and reliability test campaigns that inform engineering decisions.
• Experience in reliability techniques including MTBF, Weibull analyses, and DFMEAs.
• Strong electromechanical skills in embedded controls, real‑time compute, and actuation.
• Software proficiency (Python, Rust, C/C++)
• Electrical engineering fundamentals including battery systems, communications protocols, and RF systems.
• Strong hardware‑debugging intuition and electrical troubleshooting skills for aircraft or similarly complex electromechanical systems.
• Sound judgment to prioritize test capability, campaign scope, and fault investigations across multiple hardware programs.
• Excellent ability to ‘get unstuck’ and make progress in a complex and changing environment.
• Experience developing real‑time controls in safety critical applications.

Pay

The starting salary for this role is $165,000 - $230,000.