Electrical Engineer - Reliability

About Zipline

Do you want to change the world? Zipline is on a mission to transform the way goods move. Our aim is to solve the world’s most urgent and complex access challenges by building, manufacturing and operating the first instant delivery and logistics system that serves all humans equally, wherever they are. From powering Rwanda’s national blood delivery network and Ghana’s COVID-19 vaccine distribution, to providing on-demand home delivery for Walmart, to enabling healthcare providers to bring care directly to U.S. homes, we are transforming the way things move for businesses, governments and consumers.

The technology is complex but the idea is simple: a teleportation service that delivers what you need, when you need it. Using robotics and autonomy, we are decarbonizing delivery, decreasing road congestion, and reducing fossil fuel consumption and air pollution, while providing equitable access to billions of people and building a more resilient global supply chain.

Join Zipline and help us to make good on our promise to build an equitable and more resilient global supply chain for billions of people.

About the Role

As a Hardware Reliability Engineer focused on Avionics at Zipline, you will apply your knowledge of electrical hardware systems at the board and system level along with reliability theory to meet safety, on-time delivery, and unit-cost objectives for our aircraft. We have completed more than a 750,000 flights around the globe; with each package we ship, your work contributes directly toward improving the lives of our customers and their communities.

In this role, you will have clear ownership of our Avionics reliability program from concept-to-field. We expect you to set reliability goals, drive our engineering team to reach those goals, and serve as a cross-functional technical expert along the way.

What You'll Do

• Quantify reliability goals for Zipline’s Avionics; maintain a reliability budget through that product’s lifetime
• Decompose system and sub-system level reliability goals into actionable requirements
• Influence key design decisions and concept trades for new products, applying analytical reliability methods to uncover risks and opportunities early in the design process (FTA, RBD)
• Bridge electrical / mechanical / software disciplines by facilitating design risk assessment techniques (FMEA/FMECA, etc.) at the critical moment
• Quantify environmental stresses and field usage using data analysis methods to become actionable by design
• Develop and maintain hardware life-stress models with a physics-of-failure approach
• Develop hardware validation test plans and technical test specifications to demonstrate lifetime reliability and environmental objectives
• Thrive in leading multiple problem-solving efforts; contribute and validate solutions for issues discovered through testing or in the field
• Monitor reliability performance of the system throughout development and deployment in the real world, and implement lessons learned into the process.

What You'll Bring

• A background in Electrical Engineering, plus a passion for analysis and testing
• Past experiences developing safety-critical systems resilient to harsh climatic environments, mechanical vibration, ESD, and high electrical noise. For example, aerospace, infrastructure, medical, and transportation fields
• A proven track record of setting, driving to, and achieving reliability budgets in complex systems 
• Knowledge of HALT, ALT, ESS methods; experience specifying and implementing testing for the right application. E.g. test stress, duration, and sample size
• Familiarity with making data-driven decisions from large multivariate datasets, including probability and statistical methods, using programming (Matlab, R, Python, SQL)
• Strength applying appropriate failure analysis techniques that add value (Weibull analysis, etc.)
• Comfort interpreting electrical schematic and SLD drawings for failure mode and root cause identification
• Experience working with external vendors to predict and manage reliability of commercial equipment

What Else You Need to Know