Senior Electrical Engineer - Avionics

Confirmed live in the last 24 hours

Zipline

Compensation

$160,000 - $225,000/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 Senior Electrical Engineer will develop avionics for our next-generation aircraft. We are looking for an engineer with a strong foundation in circuit board design and an excellent grasp of electronics development, processes, and tools.

As a Senior Electrical Engineer on the Avionics team, you will be responsible for designing electronics including flight computers, communication systems, safety systems, and more. These components 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. In addition, you will have the opportunity to collaborate with world class engineers across all disciplines and experience levels. Zipline values personal development highly and encourages an environment of continuous learning and mentorship.

The Avionics team encounters many challenges when designing robust avionics systems to provide life-saving service in some of the harshest environments on Earth. At the start of any project, our team plays a vital role in system architecture, designing for performance, reliability, and fault tolerance, while balancing mass and cost. Included in this is the design of an FAA-approved safety system to ensure the safety of employees, customers, and bystanders. Our sophisticated flight systems also require us to build custom solutions with high performance embedded computing and high speed serial buses. To achieve Zipline’s goal of serving anyone anywhere, all aspects of a design must also be successful in a wide range of real-world environments by being robust against environmental, ESD, and EMI threats. These are just some of the many challenges that make us excited to go to work everyday.

What You'll Do

Engineer avionics for volume production through a full design cycle including requirements, prototype, schematic capture, layout, and validation, with a focus on compute, sensing, and perception.
Shape the architecture of Zipline’s next generation product, making impactful design decisions daily, while working with a high level of independence.
Lead trade studies, understand competing design priorities, develop hardware requirements to meet system level requirements and provide direction and clarity for burning down risk.
Proactively seek out opportunities for improvement in system, vehicle, and component level design.
Collaborate cross-functionally in all stages of development, including:
- Architecture: fault tolerance, power, mass