Systems Safety Engineer

Staff Systems Engineer - Flight Reliability

South San Francisco, California, USA

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.

We’re looking for a Staff Systems Engineer - Flight Reliability to join our team who has developed, tested, and deployed complex electromechanical systems into safety critical environments. Do you enjoy tackling the most cross‑disciplinary parts of a complex program? Do you thrive in solving business‑critical problems with little direction, a high degree of ownership, and the freedom to make it happen?

At Zipline our work is intended for the field. Patients are counting on it today--there is no time for coming up short. If being an engineering leader on the team driving us to achieve our ambitious goals to scale operations and production, improve reliability, level‑up our customer experience, and efficiently mature our processes to support all of this appeals to you, read on.

Zipline was founded by engineers dedicated to making the world a better place. We are scaling around the world and we need someone to join our team who is excited to help level up Systems Engineering ry day, your commitment and technical leadership will help save lives.

• Serve as a trusted technical expert of deploying high‑reliability, autonomous systems into safety‑critical environments to ensure we ship safe and robust systems
• Own top‑level safety requirement definition, decomposition, and traceability
• Define interfaces and drive cross disciplinary discussions to align on safety and reliability budgets
• Create and maintain fault trees, failure modes and effects analyses, and hazard tracking including the tools and processes you and many at the company use in these practices
• Partner with engineering teams and operations data to track reliability and safety performance in test and operations
• Partner with design engineering, other systems engineers and certification team to prove flight worthiness to regulators
• Own public‑facing safety reports and set the industry standard for transparency and public trust

• BS and/or MS in Aerospace Engineering, Systems Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering or related fields
• 8+ years of real‑world experience in safety critical electromechanical systems, for example in autonomous vehicles, aerospace, or industrial automation fields including systems/vehicle design experience
• A proven track record setting up systems safety processes in new projects and/or startup environments
• Demonstrated track record of developing first‑principles based safety analysis and decision making in the absence of well‑established regulations or industry guidance
• The ability to dive in when appropriate to solve problems using tools such as your modeling language/tool of choice, systems modeling, and statistical analysis among others
• Knowledge from designing systems that were resilient to harsh climatic environments, mechanical vibration, ESD, and/or high electrical noise
• Experience with not only fail‑safe fault tolerant modes but also fail‑operative modes that enable the system to continue to operate through faults
• Leadership skills to grow and develop a world class level of…