Senior ​/ Staff Mechanical 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—this role changes fleet uptime and customer trust.

As a Senior Mechanical Engineer on Dropbox, you will own the mechanical architecture and detailed design of key assemblies through validation, production ramp, and fleet operation. You will make architecture-level tradeoffs that balance safety, reliability, manufacturability, and serviceability for an unattended field-facing product. This is a hands-on, individual-contributor role responsible for designs that must meet high-cycle life, environmental exposure, and low-maintenance targets in real-world sites.

• Own end-to-end mechanical scope for Dropbox assemblies: requirements, architecture, detailed CAD, drawings, specifications, BOMs, and production release.
• Define success metrics for your systems (e.g., target field MTBF, service MTTR, production yield, or mean time between service actions) and drive design choices to meet them.
• Translate customer workflows, hazard analyses, and droid interfaces into mechanical requirements and verified designs that minimize field interventions.
• Lead trade studies and system-level decisions across safety, reliability, cycle time, environmental performance, serviceability, DFM, DFA, cost, and schedule; document chosen trade-offs and residual risks.
• Create GD&T, datum strategy, alignment schemes, and tolerance stack-ups across complex electromechanical interfaces to ensure consistent assembly and alignment during high-volume builds.
• Perform and apply first-principles analysis, hand calculations, kinematic analysis, fatigue/wear assessments, and FEA to set margins and validate designs against defined targets.
• Integrate actuators, transmissions, bearings, sensors, PCBAs, connectors, harnesses, seals, and embedded controls into reliable assemblies; define and verify mechanical/electrical interfaces.
• Partner closely with Electrical, Embedded Software, Systems, Test, Reliability, Manufacturing, Operations, and Safety to develop validation plans covering functional, lifetime, environmental, abuse, and fault-condition scenarios.
• Prototype rapidly, run targeted experiments and test campaigns, and use…