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. 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 thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth. Our team is motivated by building systems that have a direct, meaningful impact on people’s lives and by scaling the future of logistics. We are seeking people who sculpt from first principles, enjoy facing adversity, and can do the impossible at record breaking speeds.
About You & the Role
Zipline’s Manufacturing Engineering team delivers the production systems that turn autonomous delivery aircraft and their subsystems into reliable, repeatable products at scale. As a Mechatronics Engineer, Production Equipment based at Coop, Zipline’s South San Francisco manufacturing site, you will integrate mechanisms, electrical interfaces, sensors, actuators, pneumatics, and controls into reliable production equipment for aircraft, battery packs, docks, and flight-critical subsystems. Your focus will be the interfaces between equipment disciplines, from requirements and build through integrated debugging, acceptance, and safe commissioning on the factory floor.
This is a hands-on individual-contributor role, with direct ownership of equipment design, build, commissioning, and improvement on the factory floor. Your work determines throughput, first-pass yield, assembly cycle time, and maintenance uptime for production lines that supply field operations and live delivery fleets; mistakes affect fleet readiness and safety-critical performance.
What You’ll Do
Integrate mechanical motion, pneumatics, sensors, actuators, industrial electrical interfaces, and safety interfaces into production-ready tooling and small automation.
Debug interactions between mechanisms, sensing, actuation, and controls; verify integrated equipment behavior during vendor acceptance and factory commissioning.
Own end-to-end integration and delivery of production equipment and tooling projects for aircraft and electro-mechanical subsystems: requirements, CAD (Siemens NX), detailed drawings, vendor fabrication oversight, build, commissioning, and production release.
Deliver measurable improvements: increase tooling availability above 95%, reduce manual assembly cycle time by 20–40% per station, and improve first-pass yield (FPY) on targeted assemblies by at least 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 end-of-line test rigs tied to build and test specs for aircraft, battery packs, and docks.
Perform 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.
Develop and apply tooling design standards, GD&T…