Senior Electrical Engineer - Avionics (RF)

Confirmed live in the last 24 hours

Zipline

Compensation

$160,000 - $200,000/year

South San Francisco, California, USA

On-site

Posted March 27, 2026

Job Description

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 and The Role

The Avionics team is a group of hardware and software experts responsible for designing robust systems that control our life-saving drone delivery service in some of the toughest environments on Earth. Our team designs aircraft avionics that must excel in a wide range of harsh, real-world climates and electromagnetic interference (EMI) environments. The Avionics system is a vital part of the overall zipline aircraft system architecture, where we strive to achieve high performance and reliability while minimizing mass and cost.

You and your team will be responsible for delivering high performance communication and navigation systems that are tightly integrated into the Avionics flight computer. These radio systems are at the core of a new unmanned aerial system that will enable Zipline’s impact to expand from 100,000 deliveries/year to 100 million across the globe. Zipline’s future success depends on the development of avionics systems that are low mass, low cost, high reliability, and produced at high volumes. Rigorous design engineering and validation is required, as well as ingenuity in approaches to packaging, integration, fault tolerance, and validation.

We are looking for a leader with a strong foundation in RF system design and an excellent grasp of communication system design, RF electronics, and antenna design.

What You'll Do

Join a small but mighty team of RF engineers owning RF communications at Zipline. This includes Zip to Zip, Zip to Dock, Zip to Droid, and Zip to GA Aircraft. Today, we use tightly integrated 802.11, cellular, ADS-B, and GNSS radio systems.
Develop and implement RF engineering processes to ensure high quality on tight, deterministic timelines.
Provide technical leadership in system level design spanning RF link budgets, interference analysis, and RF MAC layer.
Define, trade, revisit, and update vehicle RF architecture. Optimize at the integrated vehicle and fleet system levels.
Design radios, amplifiers, filters, and antennas to meet RF architecture and requirements.
Develop confirmation tests, including functional, end of line, and system level tests to ensure the RF systems meet all the necessary specifications.
Coordinate regulatory and industry certification for domestic and international markets.
Coordinate within the Avionics and Ground Systems teams to implement the RF systems in the aircraft highly integrated flight computer as well as the Zip Dock.
Coordinate across teams such as GNC, Aero, and Perception to determine requirements for the RF system performance, identify trades, and ensure reliable operation for downstream systems.
Ongoing engineering to successfully sustain the operation of existing avionics systems in our existing fleet of