Senior Loads and Dynamics Engineer - Aeroelastics and Rotordynamics

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.

You are a hands-on Senior Structural Engineer owning aircraft structural analysis, system level Global Finite Element Models (GFEMs), and assembly level Detailed Finite Element Models (DFEMs). At Zipline you will apply first-principles analysis and tight design-test-analysis loops to keep our delivery aircraft safe, light, and highly available for continuous logistics operations. Your work directly affects aircraft airworthiness, fleet uptime, and mission success—increasing vehicle life, decreasing maintenance intervals, root causing & preventing in-field failures, and enabling higher payloads and range for deliveries. This role reports into the Structural Analysis Lead and operates across design, test, reliability, systems, and field operations and is based at Zipline's manufacturing and test lab facility in South San Francisco. Travel to field sites and test ranges is typically 5-10% depending on program phase.

How to know if it's you: You’ve built your own prototypes to get quick answers, pencil and paper calculations are always your first step, you prefer simple and fast over detailed and large, you are on the floor during system testing, you have never presented a FEM plot without adjusting the legend scale . On any given day you could be building test articles in our composites/prototype labs, developing simple models to inform design trade studies, performing structural tests to validate analysis, working across disciplines to tackle complex system level challenges, root causing a test or field failure, or in the field supporting flight tests.

• Own and maintain the top-level Global Finite Element Model (GFEM): set and enforce standards for material properties, numbering, interfaces, model fidelity, and validation procedures. Ensure GFEM is the go-to single source of truth resource for the team.

• Produce rapid analysis studies and design guidance: perform hand calculations and create lightweight beam/shell FEMs to drive design trades; deliver updated models and results within 24–48 hours to match evolving configurations.

• Structural sizing and certification support: