Senior Manufacturing 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.

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.

About You and

The Role As a Senior Manufacturing Engineer, you will turn complex electro-mechanical products into safe, reliable, repeatable production lines for Zipline’s aircraft, docks, and logistics hardware. You will own assigned final assembly and feeder sub-assembly lines from process definition and tooling through validation, production release, and sustainment.

This work connects aerospace-quality manufacturing with reliable field operations and rapid production growth. You will help scale output from tens to thousands of units per week over the next 1–3 years while meeting safety and reliability expectations. Your initial priority is to bring a complex electro-mechanical sub-assembly in-house and validate its production line within months.

What You'll Do Own end-to-end industrialization of assigned assembly lines and feeder sub-assemblies, from concept, tooling, and pilot builds through production release and sustainment.

Design, procure, fabricate, install, and commission fixtures, gauges, tooling, workstations, and ergonomic operator flows at Zipline manufacturing sites.

Define, execute, and sign off on process validation, including PFMEAs, control plans, capability studies (Cp/Cpk), first-article inspections, pilot builds, and production-release criteria.

Own first-pass yield, throughput, takt, mean time between failures, downtime, and cost-of-poor-quality metrics; drive improvements against quarterly targets.

Lead DFM reviews and tradeoffs with product design to reduce assembly time, simplify inspection, and lower cost per unit while meeting aerospace safety and field-reliability requirements.

Investigate escalated production issues and escapes, validate root causes, implement corrective and preventive actions, and update control plans to prevent recurrence.

Create, validate, and maintain SOPs, work instructions, control plans, and training materials; train and qualify technicians and line leads.

Coordinate execution with Design Engineering, Quality, Supply Chain, Maintenance, and Ops Program Management as the primary manufacturing owner for assigned product lines.

Plan capacity and production scaling against demand…