Test Engineer, Dropbox

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.

Zipline builds and operates autonomous delivery systems that move critical goods reliably and safely. Dropbox is our customer‑facing package‑loading product that integrates mechatronics, sensors, electronics, access control, user interaction, and environmental protection so untrained users can hand off packages to our droids. Failures or slow service at Dropbox directly increase field escalations, maintenance cost, and delivery delays.

As a Senior Hardware Test Engineer on Dropbox, you will own mechanical‑heavy test and validation for critical assemblies and system‑level behaviors. You will develop the test methods, equipment, automation, and evidence needed to prove that Dropbox meets its functional, safety, reliability, environmental, and lifetime requirements.

This is a hands‑on individual‑contributor role spanning test strategy, fixture design, instrumentation, experimental execution, data analysis, and failure investigation. You will work closely with design engineers while maintaining independent judgment about test adequacy, product risk, and release readiness.

• Own end‑to‑end validation of Dropbox mechanisms, structures, enclosures, electromechanical assemblies, and mechanical interfaces from prototype through fleet deployment.
• Translate product requirements, hazard analyses, field conditions, customer workflows, and known failure modes into measurable test requirements and pass/fail criteria.
• Develop verification plans with clear coverage, traceability, sample sizes, margins, acceptance criteria, and exit gates.
• Design, analyze, build, commission, and maintain test stands, fixtures, environmental setups, automated cycle rigs, and representative system test articles.
• Select and integrate instrumentation such as load cells, torque sensors, displacement sensors, accelerometers, strain gauges, thermocouples, cameras, current sensors, and data‑acquisition hardware.
• Produce drawings, tolerance analyses, safety reviews, BOMs, assembly instructions, calibration procedures, and maintenance documentation for test equipment.
• Apply free‑body diagrams, hand calculations, tolerance analysis, kinematics, fatigue and wear models, and FEA to design test equipment and establish representative loading.
• Develop tests covering structural strength, mechanism performance, high‑cycle life, wear, ingress, contamination, corrosion, temperature, humidity, misuse, obstruction, package variation, installation variation, and fault recovery.
• Validate interactions among mechanical hardware, actuators, sensors, electronics, embedded…