Senior Electrical Test Engineer, Hardware Validation

About Zipline

Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service, operating on four continents and delivering critical supplies—including blood, vaccines, medical supplies, food, and retail products—every 30 seconds. We design, build, and operate the world’s largest autonomous logistics system to provide equal access to food, medicine, and essential goods anytime, anywhere.

We are hiring equivalent electrical test engineers across Avionics and Ground Systems. This hands‑on individual-contributor role spans test strategy, instrumentation, experimental execution, data analysis, manufacturing test, 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 PCBAs, avionics products, and power electronics 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.
• Validate interactions among electrical hardware, actuators, sensors, electronics, and embedded controls.
• Automate test execution, data collection, health monitoring, fault detection, and reporting using Python or equivalent tools.
• Define sample sizes, acceleration factors, confidence levels, and statistical acceptance criteria that produce defensible reliability evidence.
• Correlate bench and accelerated tests with field telemetry, returned hardware, service records, and observed environmental conditions.
• Identify gaps between laboratory tests and field failures, then update test profiles to improve fidelity.
• Lead structured failure investigations using physical inspection, teardown, dimensional measurements, logs, instrumentation, and fault‑tree methods.
• Distinguish product failures from fixture, instrumentation, software, setup, and operator‑induced failures.
• Partner with Mechanical, Electrical, Embedded Software, Systems, Reliability, Manufacturing, Operations, and Safety teams to drive failures to root cause and permanent corrective action.
• Establish regression tests that detect hardware and software changes affecting mechanism performance, safety, or reliability.
• Present test evidence, unresolved risks, and release recommendations clearly during design and readiness reviews.
• Work directly with suppliers and manufacturing partners to validate components, tooling, processes, and production changes.
• Mentor engineers and technicians in fixture design, instrumentation, experimental methods, test execution, and failure analysis.
• Improve test throughput, repeatability, automation, lab utilization, and failure‑to‑answer time.

• Proven ownership of electrical or electromechanical hardware validation through development, qualification, production ramp, and field deployment.
• Deep hands‑on experience designing and building electrical test rigs, fixtures, instrumented assemblies, and automated cycle‑test systems.
• Strong electrical engineering fundamentals.
• Practical experience selecting, installing, calibrating, and troubleshooting sensors and data‑acquisition systems.
• Experience validating mechanisms containing actuators, PCBAs, harnesses, and embedded controls.
• Demonstrated expertise in experimental design, measurement uncertainty, repeatability, sample‑size selection, accelerated testing, and statistical confidence.
• Experience developing automated test and analysis tools using Python or an…