Senior Data Scientist - Systems Engineering

Senior Data Scientist - Systems Engineering

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, manufacturing and operating the first instant delivery and logistics system that serves all humans equally, wherever they are. From powering Rwanda’s national blood delivery network and Ghana’s COVID-19 vaccine distribution, to providing on-demand home delivery for Walmart, to enabling healthcare providers to bring care directly to U.S. homes, we are transforming the way things move for businesses, governments, and consumers. The technology is complex but the idea is simple: a teleportation service that delivers what you need, when you need it. Through our technology that includes robotics and autonomy, we are decarbonizing delivery, decreasing road congestion, and reducing fossil fuel consumption and air pollution, while providing equitable access to billions of people and building a more resilient global supply chain. 

About You and The Role  

Zipline is hiring a Senior Data Scientist within the Systems Engineering team to support quantitative characterization of the airspace we operate in and analysis of the vast amounts of data produced by our autonomous aircraft to monitor system performance and inform system design. In this role, you’ll develop a deep understanding and compelling visualizations of the traffic patterns of the global low altitude airspace across the data collected by our fleet and from multiple available data sources that monitor low altitude traffic. Additionally, you may dive in to answer questions like how often do two Zips (drones) get closer than expected or how often do we encounter different types of obstacles when delivering in residential backyards. The ideal candidate will be excited about deeply understanding the questions we’re trying to answer and developing high-quality code and user-friendly tools to derive insights from our data and help your teammates do the same. Your work will enable the entire organization to make more informed decisions, innovate faster, and serve our customers better. 

We’re looking for an experienced and self-directed Senior Data Scientist, ideally with a passion for aviation, to pioneer Data Science in our Systems Engineering team.

What You'll Do

• Integrate large, diverse data sources to develop an understanding of low altitude airspace including things like where different types of aircraft/rotorcraft fly in a metro most often and how that varies by factors like time of day and weather conditions.
• Evaluate key metric performance across many flights to set benchmarks, identify design opportunities, inform risk evaluation, and trigger notifications when performance dips below expectations. 
• Carry out analysis on data produced by our hardware systems and create insightful visualizations to share your findings. 
• Partner with our data engineers to identify opportunities to simplify and speed up data analysis by making upgrades to our data pipelines and data formats. 
• Spend time with your partners, primarily the Systems Engineering team, and use their feedback to create a roadmap that you’ll own and execute against. 

What You'll Bring 

• Advanced proficiency with Python and libraries commonly used for data analysis, e.g., Pandas, Numpy, Scipy, and Matplotlib. 
• Adept at analyzing and visualizing  large datasets and making complex results understandable at a glance. 
• Experience working with geospatial data and comfortable analyzing large spatial datasets, ideally using open source tooling such as GDAL, PostGIS, Rasterio
• Strong understanding of applied mathematics, descriptive statistics, probability, and statistical modeling.  
• Skilled at translating a general question or problem into clearly defined analysis and presenting actionable insights. 
• Experience working with aerospace (ideal), automotive, robotics, and/or hardware data.
• Adept at ruthlessly prioritizing critical analysis requests and balancing multiple high-value projects, deadlines, and stakeholders at once.
• A desire to continuously improve your work and the work of others. 
• Experience listening to customers, identifying opportunities, and creating roadmaps and project plans. 
• Eager to embed in engineering teams and develop domain knowledge about aviation, airspace, and weather.
• Nice to haves: 
• Experience with Databricks or PySpark
• Understanding of aviation, such as experience as a pilot or similar
• Experience building interactive visualizations 
• Experience working with continuous integration and continuous