Production Equipment & Tooling Design Engineer

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.

At Zipline, manufacturing capability is a core part of the product. We are looking for a highly capable Production Equipment & Tooling Design Engineer to join our Manufacturing Engineering team. In this role you will design and deliver the custom production equipment, fixtures, jigs, workstations, assembly aids, and test tooling that enable safe, repeatable, and scalable builds across our aircraft, zips, docks, and critical feeder subassemblies.

This is a deeply cross‑functional role. You will work closely with design engineers, manufacturing engineers, quality engineers, operations program managers, technicians, maintenance teams, and external vendors to bring equipment from concept through commissioning and sustainment. You will own equipment and tooling projects end‑to‑end: defining requirements, generating concepts, building CAD, releasing detailed designs, supporting fabrication, debugging on the floor, validating performance, and driving continuous improvement after launch.

You are a hands‑on mechanical designer with strong manufacturing instincts. You understand that great production equipment is not just functional—it is safe, ergonomic, robust, serviceable, and easy for operators and technicians to use. You move quickly, make sound engineering tradeoffs, and know how to turn ambiguity into practical hardware that improves throughput, quality, and cost.

• Design custom production tooling, fixtures, jigs, workstations, automated and semi‑automated equipment for Drone, Delivery pod, Dock, Zipline Dropbox, Subassembly and other builds.
• Develop detailed 3D CAD, drawings, BOMs, preventative maintenance plans, and documentation for internal builds and external vendors.
• Partner with manufacturing engineers to define and capture process requirements into robust, operator‑friendly hardware.
• Improve assembly quality and throughput through fixture design, error‑proofing, ergonomics, and process simplification.
• Support build events and production launches by troubleshooting tooling and equipment issues directly on the floor.
• Drive vendor builds from quote to fabrication, assembly, debug, installation, and acceptance.
• Create and refine tooling for operations such as alignment, joining, fastening, pressing, dispensing, inspection, and functional test.
• Standardize tooling designs and components where possible to reduce cost, lead time, and maintenance burden.

• 5+ years of experience designing manufacturing equipment, tooling, or fixtures in a production environment.
• Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering or a related field.
• Strong mechanical design skills, including GD&T, tolerance stack‑up, mechanism design, and material/process selection.
• Proficiency in 3D CAD;
  Siemens NX preferred.
• Experience designing and releasing custom tooling for repeatable assembly of electro‑mechanical products.
• Hands‑on experience supporting fabrication, build, debug, and commissioning of production equipment.
• Familia…