Jobs and Careers

Senior Mechanical Hardware Reliability Engineer

South San Francisco, United Statesfull_timeVerifiedPosted 11 Aug 2026

About the role

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

As a Senior Mechanical Hardware Reliability Engineer, you will own the reliability of critical mechanical and electromechanical systems across Zipline’s autonomous delivery platform. Your primary scope may include systems such as our next-generation delivery Dropbox or delivery pod, with opportunities to own other mechanical systems depending on your experience and background.

You’ll work at both the system and component level: defining what reliability needs to mean for products operating at massive scale, identifying the failure modes that matter most, influencing architecture and design, and determining how we should validate that hardware is ready to deploy. For systems where reliability is driven as much by unit economics, availability, and maintenance burden as by safety, you’ll help establish the appropriate reliability targets and release criteria rather than simply executing against an existing specification.

You’ll combine strong mechanical engineering fundamentals, hands-on failure investigation, Design-for-Reliability, Physics-of-Failure, and statistical methods to uncover risks early and drive them to resolution. This role requires a high degree of technical ownership and judgment: you’ll be expected to independently identify where deeper investigation will have the greatest impact and work across design, test, manufacturing, quality, and operations to deliver hardware capable of long service lives at scale.

What You'll Do

Own the reliability strategy for mission-critical mechanical subsystems or entire systems, such as the Dropbox or delivery pod, applying Design-for-Reliability (DfR) and Physics-of-Failure (PoF) principles.
Define system reliability targets, life requirements, and release criteria based on safety, availability, unit economics, operational burden, and the maturity of the program. Translate these targets into design-level requirements, verification plans, and objective pass/fail criteria.
Lead system- and component-level FMEAs to identify the highest-value reliability risks, influence architecture and design decisions, and prioritize where deeper analysis or testing is needed.
Develop Accelerated Life Testing (ALT) and environmental test campaigns that efficiently demonstrate long-term performance, including determining how to revalidate systems as designs evolve.
Lead complex test failures and field issues from initial triage through root cause, risk assessment, and corrective action, including making technically grounded recommendations about hardware readiness and release.
Sign off on test verification results and assess hardware readiness for flight from a reliability standpoint.
Define operational life limits and service intervals using a combination of test data, field returns, and statistical models.
Provide clear technical direction in ambiguous situations, balancing reliability risk against schedule, resources, cost, and operational impact.
Improve Zipline’s reliability methods, tools, standards, and decision-making processes as the company scales.