Systems Engineering Intern [Fall 2023]

About Zipline

Zipline is on a mission to transform the way goods move. Our aim is to solve the world’s most urgent and complex access challenges by building the first instant logistics system that serves all humans equally. Leveraging expertise in robotics and autonomy, Zipline designs, builds, and operates a fleet of cutting edge, autonomous delivery drones. We serve tens of millions of people around the world.

Joining Zipline’s Emerging Talent program as an intern is an opportunity to contribute to our promise of building a system that provides equitable access to critical healthcare supplies for millions of people. We believe that internships are more than just opportunities to learn by watching or doing low level tasks. We expect our interns to take on meaningful work that actively contributes to moving Zipline’s mission forward, while learning real-world skills that will serve them in their careers for the long term. 

Join us, and build the future of logistics with the best humans around!

About the Systems Engineering Team

In simplest terms, the goal of Zipline’s System Engineering team is to make sure everyone at Zipline knows the answer to “why?” Why does the aircraft have the performance specs it has today? Why is the Distribution Center arranged the way it is? Why do we need to have a particular number of aircraft in the fleet? Why did we choose the environmental operating conditions we did? And why are we even doing the engineering work we’re doing today?

One of our core values at Zipline is customer obsession. Correctly answering the “why?” question requires getting close to our customers, understanding their challenges, and finding out the best solutions for them. We expect our System Engineers to amplify the customer’s voice in product development discussions, raise a red flag when we’re drifting away from what’s best for the customer, and steer us back onto the right track--using data to back up all decisions along the way.

The Role

Systems Engineering is a cross-disciplinary function that works closely with all engineering teams at Zipline as well as non-technical teams, like sales and marketing, and our external customers. 

System Engineers are able to understand the customer needs and translate them into actionable and testable requirements for the other engineering teams. We use a structured approach to decompose a high-level system function--like delivering a package to a customer--into low-level requirements for each subsystem: what does the flight controller, the aileron, or the user interface each need to do to make that delivery happen? Due to the complexity of the Zipline system, we must take a structured approach to not miss any design details. The other engineering teams rely on Systems Engineers to ensure we are building the right pieces, and that those pieces will work correctly the first time when put together. We’re constantly optimizing our systems engineering approach to make sure it achieves these goals while also allowing us to be agile and deliver new products quickly.

What You'll Do  

• Identify who Zipline’s customers are and get as close to them as you can, to build customer empathy and determine what their needs are 
• Gather data, assumptions, design constraints, and trade study inputs from key stakeholders
• Conduct data analysis to provide confidence in the completeness and correctness of design specifications
• Support requirements definition, flight log analysis, simulation frameworks, safety assessments, and testing for new engineering products
• Identify, define, and manage key interfaces between systems, to enable concurrent work on multiple projects
• Perform high-level system design trades -- for example, should we have two launchers for different wind directions, one launcher that rotates, or a more powerful launcher that can compensate for any tailwind?
• Review test plans, participate in test execution, and review test results
• Help maintain the source of truth for system design and capabilities, to be referenced by all other teams, such as business development, marketing, and regulatory

What You'll Bring 

• A passion for getting close to customers and building products they will love
• A successful track record of completing projects in a cross-disciplinary environment where you worked with multiple technical and non-technical teams
• Tenacity to find an answer on how to move a project forward when no data or past references seem to exist
• Solid understanding of engineering fundamentals in the fields of mechanical, electrical, and computer science
• Ability to solve complex multidisciplinary problems using tools such as a modeling language/tool of your choice, statistical analysis, and first-principles physics<