Failure Analysis 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’s autonomous delivery systems depend on reliable avionics electronics, flex circuits, harnesses, and connectors operating through vibration, repeated motion, temperature cycling, moisture, and manufacturing variation.

As a Failure Analysis Engineer, you will investigate failures from fielded systems, development testing, life testing, and manufacturing. You will help reproduce failures, isolate electrical faults, inspect hardware, analyze data, and develop evidence-supported conclusions.

This is a hands-on role suited to an early-career engineer or highly technical hardware professional who enjoys working in the lab and wants to develop deeper expertise in electronics, materials, reliability, and physical failure analysis.

• Investigate failures involving flex circuits, rigid-flex assemblies, PCBAs, connectors, harnesses, solder joints, vias, and electronic components.

• Preserve failed hardware and collect relevant configuration, test, manufacturing, service, and field data.

• Reproduce intermittent failures under representative electrical, mechanical, thermal, and environmental conditions.

• Troubleshoot hardware using schematics, wiring diagrams, multimeters, oscilloscopes, power supplies, electronic loads, logic analyzers, thermal imaging, and protocol tools.

• Analyze telemetry, test logs, measurements, and inspection results to identify patterns and narrow possible causes.

• Perform hands-on inspection and support physical analysis using microscopy, X-ray, cross-sectioning, and other appropriate techniques.

• Develop and execute experiments that prove or disprove suspected failure mechanisms.

• Use structured methods such as fault trees, 5-Why, fishbone analysis, and 8D to separate symptoms from root cause.

• Work with Electrical, Mechanical, Test, Reliability, Manufacturing, Quality, and Supplier Engineering to review evidence and determine next steps.

• Support