Head of Systems Engineering

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.

Our customers include healthcare systems, governments, retailers, restaurants and global businesses who rely on us to save lives, reduce emissions, increase economic opportunity, and provide rapid delivery services.

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.

About You and The Role

You will lead the systems engineering team responsible for defining the product capabilities roadmap, decomposing those capabilities into concrete architectures engineering teams can deliver on, and system validation & verification of new capabilities across current and future autonomous aircraft platforms.

This is a key leadership position focused on safely scaling autonomous operations into increasingly complex environments.

What You'll Do

Scope includes product-level requirements, architecture and decomposition, verification plans, and operational performance monitoring across the following areas:

• Network Optimization & Capacity
• Aircraft Autonomy
• Flight Performance
• Operational Design Domain / Operating Envelope
• Flight Reliability and Fault Management

Responsibilities include:

• Own system-level architecture, requirements, metrics, and test coverage for safety-critical autonomous systems
• Define interfaces and drive cross-disciplinary architecture discussions
• Develop frameworks and facilitate trade studies for performance, safety, and cost optimization
• Create and maintain systems models and diagrams
• Set hardware and software release standards and test requirements
• Partner with safety engineering and regulatory teams to prove flight worthiness

Leadership

• Grow and mentor the Systems Engineering team and adjacent teams
• Drive the multi-year technical roadmap across the product

What You'll Bring

• Leadership delivering complex technical solutions across cross-functional organizations
• Experience shipping high-reliability, safety-critical autonomous systems
• Deep systems engineering expertise in architecture, interface definition, decomposition, verification, and validation
• Knowledge of fail-safe, fault-tolerant, and fail-operative autonomy approaches
• Experience balancing safety, performance, cost, and operational constraints using models and metrics
• Strong communication and technical leadership skills

Additional Information

Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes applications from candidates of diverse backgrounds and experiences.