Electrical Engineering Intern (Summer 2025)

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 Ground Systems Team

Drones are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to building a scaled instant logistics system. Operating a fleet of delivery drones to serve millions of customers requires highly efficient, automated, reliable, scalable, and deployable ground systems -- in even higher production volumes than the aircraft themselves. Our ground systems are flight and safety critical and are installed worldwide. Zipline will depend on you to develop novel solutions that enable unprecedented scale and efficiency.

About The Role

Leading the way in drone delivery often means exceeding the capabilities of what's available off the shelf, and as a result we are engineering the majority of our system in-house. Doubling down on the reliability of our systems is critical to delivering to our next billion customers--people whose lives will be meaningfully affected by smarter, more equitable access. We are deliberately expanding our electrical capabilities and adding to the ranks of our experienced team to achieve these goals.

We need dedicated engineers to burn down risk and improve reliability in our system like their life depends on it, because others' lives do. Electronics are where software meets the physical world, and so our electrical engineering team has a wide array of engineering skills and works with a variety of different teams. We need people who are comfortable working in different domains, thrive when working on a problem as part of a small group, and are able to communicate technical concepts clearly to a wide variety of stakeholders--software and mechanical engineers, hardware test and manufacturing, and operations and field support, to name a few. Our small team can get a lot done because our team members are strong individual contributors with a good grasp of electrical engineering fundamentals and the ability to define requirements for their systems, rapidly develop creative and simple solutions, and prove with testing that their work meets the rigors and edge-cases of real-world deployment.

What You'll Do  

You'll have your own projects but we haven't been saving an "intern project" - you'll be a full member of our team, and like with our other engineers, we'll work with you to find projects that align with your goals and interests and the team's and company's priorities.

Examples of previous projects included:

• Prototyping new versions of our battery charging electronics to meet harsher environmental requirements in new countries where we're launching our service
• Architecting ground support electronics to assist the air vehicle with take-off and landing

What You'll Bring 

The part of your application we're most interested in is "prior engineering experience," somewhat broadly defined. We would like the following three things to be true:

• Must have at least completed the second year of your Undergraduate studies. Masters and PhD students are also eligible. 
• You've designed and tested a custom circuit board (it doesn't need to have worked - we'd love to hear about it!)
• You've worked on a project in or out of school that moved under its own power (plane, car, boat, quadcopter, rocket, balloon, rocket on a balloon, submarine, rover, etc. - we're not picky)
• You've collaborated on the above two things as part of a group - school club, competition team, as part of a job/internship, or just with friends
• In your application, we'd love to see either a sample of work you're proud of or a short note about your prior experience and how it relates to the three points above.

What Else You Need to Know   

Our internships are full-time positions, in-person at our South San Francisco office. We will host our S