Hardware Reliability Engineer

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 is building autonomous aircraft and ground infrastructure that must operate safely and reliably across demanding environments, high utilization, and long service lives with minimal maintenance. As an Electrical Hardware Reliability Engineer, you will bring your hands-on experience in RF, digital, analog, and/or power circuit problem-solving to identify and resolve our most complex electrical failures and improve overall hardware lifetime.

You will own the reliability of critical electrical hardware such as our all-electric powertrain, charging systems, de-icing heater system, navigation sensor suite, or other electrical assemblies within our aircraft and ground systems. By combining design-for-reliability principles, rigorous test definition, and hands-on root cause analysis, you’ll play a critical role in ensuring Zipline aircraft and ground-based infrastructure meet the reliability standards that will enable Zipline to hyperscale. Depending on your experience and background, your scope may range from deep component-level reliability ownership to setting the reliability direction for an entire system.

• Own the reliability strategy for mission-critical electronic subsystems, applying board-level and system-level Design-for-Reliability (DfR) and Physics-of-Failure (PoF) principles.

• Allocate and decompose system reliability requirements into actionable design-level specs.

• Lead DFMEA efforts with cross-functional teams to identify early risks and drive mitigation.

• Develop Accelerated Life Testing (ALT) and environmental test campaigns to validate long-term hardware performance.

• Author test plans and procedures with clear, data-driven pass/fail criteria.

• Lead failure analysis and structured root cause investigations, from component to system-level.

• Sign off on test verification results and assess hardware readiness for flight from a reliability standpoint.

• Define operational life limits and