Mechanical Design Engineer - Aircraft

Mechanical Design Engineer - Aircraft

About Zipline

Do you want to change the world? 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 serves tens of millions of people around the world. 

Join Zipline and help us to make good on our promise to build an equitable and more resilient global supply chain for billions of people.

About You and The Role

Does working on large integrated electro-mechanical systems from conception through fully scaled production and world-wide deployment excite you? Does hearing people say something is too difficult or impossible make you want to jump in head first? Do you enjoy being the “go to” engineer on the ground, analyzing system performance, solving problems live when our systems are powered on for the first time? At Zipline our work is intended for the field. Patients are counting on it today--there is no time for aiming low or for coming up short. If leveraging your talent to drive creating elegantly engineered solutions excites you read on!

We’re looking for a driven, proactive Mechanical Design Engineer to work directly on structures and vehicle level mechanisms on the Platform 2  Aircraft.  Mechanical Design Engineers here are Zipline are responsible for coming up with novel designs that not only meet their intended function, but are also robust enough to handle the severe environments our aircraft are exposed to every life-saving delivery. This role is hands-on in moving projects forward, overseeing each phase of the product design process (Design, Build, Test, Repeat, Scale) to produce high-impact products and manage projects on short timelines. Additionally, design engineers are responsible for overseeing their designs into production, ensuring designs meet their design requirements, are manufacturable, inspectable, and can be built at scale.   If you thrive in the challenge of going around, over, under, or through obstacles and enjoy shifting priorities to work on the most impactful task at any given time read on. 

What You'll Do

As a Mechanical Design Engineer, you will use your core technical competencies to develop innovative products for our aircraft and take established designs into production. You do not let “how it is normally done” artificially limit the potential solution space but leverage your experiences, knowledge, and first principles thinking towards problem solving to create an optimal product. You are comfortable solving complex problems with little direction and maximum autonomy. Hand calcs guide your thinking and designs and help you quickly bound a problem. You are biased to action and an efficient optimizer leaning on best practices and proven processes seemingly always getting things done in half the time. You are a technical mentor and resources to others on the team, able to share best practices and review work with junior members on the team.

 

MUST HAVE EXPERIENCE / SKILL SETS

• New Grad to 5 years of experience - proven track record of complex subassemblies or full systems over at least one product program  (concept, prototype, validation, production)
  
  
• Demonstrated CAD fluency for system level ownership - 3D/2D of 20-30 parts simultaneously
  
  
• Demonstrated core competencies - GD&T, FEA for multi-body structural and thermal applications, design for assembly & field operations
  
  
• Prototyping experience AND quick iterations on projects that you have owned start to finish
  
  
• Capable of simplifying a complex problem and provide an initial analysis to scope critical constraints and feature sizing with hand calcs (beam, buckling, bolts)
  
  
• Knowledge in applying appropriate FOS and margin to human safety critical application (design margin tables, structural joint calculations)
  
  
• Experienced creating high fidelity mathematical system models (Matlab, Python, MathCAD, Excel)
  
  
• Excellent communication - written, verbal, and visual. You know how to tailor to your audience with the right level of technical depth
  
  

NICE TO HAVE

• NX is your primary CAD tool
  
  
• Experienced design to aerospace or automotive level validation standards
  
  
• Comfortable with data analysis in Python
  
  
• Prior technical mentorship to more junior colleagues
  
  
• Testing Experience - wrote and scoped test plans, executed tests, analyzed data
  
  

WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW

The starting cash range for this role is $115,000 - $150,000. Pl