Staff Systems Engineer

South San Francisco, California, USA

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. Through our technology that includes 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.

About You and The Role  

We’re looking for a Staff Systems Engineer to join our team who has developed, tested, and deployed complex electromechanical systems into safety critical environments. Do you enjoy tackling the most cross-disciplinary parts of a complex program? Do you thrive in  solving business-critical problems with little direction, a high degree of ownership, and the freedom to make it happen? At Zipline our work is intended for the field. Patients are counting on it today--there is no time for coming up short. If being an engineering leader on the team driving us to achieve our ambitious goals to scale operations and production, improve reliability, level-up our customer experience, and efficiently mature our processes to support all of this appeals to you, read on.

Zipline was founded by engineers dedicated to making the world a better place. We are scaling around the world and we need someone to join our team who is excited to help level up Systems Engineering at Zipline. Every day, your commitment and technical leadership will help save lives.

What You'll Do  

• Serve as a trusted technical expert of deploying high-reliability, autonomous systems into safety-critical environments including owning requirements, metrics, test coverage, and validation processes to ensure we ship safe and robust systems 
• Determine the highest leverage efforts and efficient strategies for deploying limited systems engineering resources in an agile, startup environment
• Own system and subsystem requirement definition, decomposition, and traceability
• Define interfaces and drive cross disciplinary discussions to align on budgets
• Develop frameworks and facilitate trade studies to optimize for performance, safety, and cost across key system architecture or operations decisions
• Determine the strategy for system design documentation including systems models, Concept of Operations, interface diagrams and more
• Set the bar for hardware and software release standards and test requirements
• Partner with design engineering, other systems engineers and certification  team to prove flight worthiness to regulators
• Be the technical lead and/or team lead for several systems engineering domains

What You'll Bring 

• 8+ years of real-world experience in safety critical electromechanical systems, for example in autonomous vehicles, aerospace, or industrial automation fields including systems/vehicle design experience
• A proven track record setting up systems engineering processes in new projects and/or startup environments such as implementing requirements including processes, definition, decomposition, and verification
• Ability to solve complex multidisciplinary problems on schedule independently
• The ability to dive in when appropriate to solve problems using tools such as your modeling language/tool of choice, systems modeling, and statistical analysis among others
• Knowledge from designing systems that were resilient to harsh climatic environments, mechanical vibration, ESD, and/or high electrical noise
• Experience with not only fail-safe fault tolerant modes but also fail-operative modes that enable the system to continue to operate through faults
• Leadership skills to grow and develop a world class systems engineering team

What Else You Need to Know   

The starting cash range for this role is $180,000 - $250,000. Please note that this is a target, starting cash range for a candidate who meets the minimum qualifications for this role. The final cash pay for this role will depend on a variety of factors, including a specific candidate's experience, qualifications, skills, working location, and projected impact. The total compensation package for this role may also include: equity compensation; discretionary annual or performance bonuses; sales incentives; benefits such as medical, dental and vision insurance; paid time off; and more.

Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, mental or physical disability, medical condition, genetic information, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, military or veteran status, citizenship, or other characteristics protected by state, federal or local law or our other policies.

We value diversity at Zipline and welcome applications from those who are traditionally underrepresented in tech. If you like the sound of this position but are not sure if you are the perfect fit, please apply!