Mechanical Test Engineer, Hardware Validation (Senior - Staff)

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 solutions.

We operate at a global scale and are looking for practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth.

About You and The Role

We are hiring ME Test engineers across multiple teams including Avionics, Ground Systems and SMI. This is a hands-on individual-contributor role spanning test strategy, fixture design, instrumentation, experimental execution, data analysis, manufacturing test and failure investigation.

You will work closely with design engineers while maintaining independent judgment about test adequacy, product risk, and release readiness.

What You'll Do

• Own end-to-end validation of mechanisms, structures, enclosures, electromechanical assemblies, and mechanical interfaces from prototype through fleet deployment.
• Translate product requirements, hazard analyses, field conditions, customer workflows, and known failure modes into measurable test requirements and pass/fail criteria.
• Develop verification plans with clear coverage, traceability, sample sizes, margins, acceptance criteria, and exit gates.
• Design, analyze, build, commission, and maintain test stands, fixtures, environmental setups, automated cycle rigs, and representative system test articles.
• Select and integrate instrumentation such as load cells, torque sensors, displacement sensors, accelerometers, strain gauges, thermocouples, cameras, current sensors, and data-acquisition hardware.
• Produce drawings, tolerance analyses, safety reviews, BOMs, assembly instructions, calibration procedures, and maintenance documentation for test equipment.
• Apply free-body diagrams, hand calculations, tolerance analysis, kinematics, fatigue and wear models, and FEA to design test equipment and establish representative loading.
• Develop tests covering structural strength, mechanism performance, high-cycle life, wear, ingress, contamination, corrosion, temperature, humidity, misuse, obstruction, package variation, installation variation, and fault recovery.
• Validate interactions among mechanical hardware, actuators, sensors, electronics, embedded controls, packages, users, and droids.
• Automate test execution, data collection, health monitoring, fault detection, and reporting using Python or equivalent tools.
• Define sample sizes, acceleration factors, confidence levels, and statistical acceptance criteria that produce defensible reliability evidence.
• Correlate bench and accelerated tests with field telemetry, returned hardware, service records, and observed environmental conditions.
• Lead structured failure investigations using physical inspection, teardown, dimensional measurements, logs, instrumentation, and fault-tree methods.
• Partner with Mechanical, Electrical, Embedded Software, Systems, Reliability, Manufacturing, Operations, and Safety teams to drive failures to root cause and permanent corrective action.
• Work directly with suppliers and manufacturing partners to validate components, tooling, processes, and production changes.
• Improve test throughput, repeatability, automation, lab utilization, and failure-to-answer time.

What You'll Bring

• Proven ownership of mechanical or electromechanical hardware validation through development, qualification, production ramp, and field deployment.
• Deep hands-on experience designing and building mechanical test rigs, fixtures, instrumented assemblies, and automated cycle-test systems.
• Strong mechanical fundamentals including statics, dynamics, kinematics, fatigue, wear, materials, bolted joints, tolerance analysis, and FEA.
• Advanced CAD and drawing skills for test equipment, fixtures, interfaces, and released hardware.
• Practical experience selecting, installing, calibrating, and troubleshooting sensors and data-acquisition systems.
• Experience validating mechanisms containing actuators, transmissions, bearings, seals, sensors, PCBAs, harnesses, and embedded controls.
• Demonstrated expertise in experimental design, measurement uncertainty, repeatability, sample-size selection, accelerated testing, and statistical confidence.
• Experience developing automated test and analysis tools using Python or an equivalent language.
• Track record finding root causes for complex or intermittent failures and verifying corrective actions.
• Experience testing environmental durability, high-cycle mechanisms, structural loads, abuse conditions, and fault recovery.
• Experience working with design teams, suppliers, manufacturing, and technicians to execute test programs under aggressive schedules.

Location and Logistics

This role is in person in South San Francisco with regular work in the lab. Travel to suppliers, manufacturers, test locations, and deployment sites is expected based on program needs.

Periodic off-hours support may be required during critical builds, test campaigns, production ramps, and field escalations.

What Success Looks Like

• Delivered repeatable test systems and validation evidence that enabled assemblies to meet reliability and release targets.
• Identified critical failure modes before fleet deployment and verified effective corrective actions.
• Improved correlation between accelerated testing and field performance.
• Reduced test cycle time, manual effort, and failure-to-answer time through better fixtures, automation, and analysis.
• Established reusable test methods that increased validation coverage and supported production and fleet expansion.

Additional Information

Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and values diversity across its workforce.