Mechanical Design Engineer - Droid SMI

About You and The Role

The droid is the delivery container at the heart of our delivery system. It's what detaches from the aircraft on a tether, descends 300 feet, and places your order on a driveway. It is also the part of Zipline that our customers actually see, hold, and interact with, which makes it one of the most demanding products we build. It has to be beautiful, cheap, quiet, weatherproof, thermally stable, and reliable for tens of thousands of flight cycles.

We're designing EV3, the next generation of the droid, and we're looking for a design engineer who can own subsystems of this product end-to-end. Not just CAD, and not just a phase of the product lifecycle, but the whole thing: sitting with our industrial designers to figure out what the product should be, defining the requirements it has to meet, taking those requirements into architecture and detailed design, prototyping and iterating, and then following the design all the way through DFM, tooling, first article, and production ramp. And then, because we're serious about scale, designing the test fixtures and assembly aids that make it possible to build and validate it consistently at rate.

You'll join a small, deeply cross-disciplinary hardware team building EV3 end-to-end.

What You'll Do

• Own subsystems of the droid end-to-end, from architecture, detailed design, prototyping, validation, DFM, tooling, and production ramp.
• Partner directly with our industrial design team to translate ID intent into engineered product - surfacing, split lines, materials, finishes, color, tactile feel. Without sacrificing manufacturability, cost, or reliability.
• Define and negotiate requirements for your subsystems, working with systems engineering, operations, and cross-functional hardware leads to make sure what you build is what the product actually needs.
• Design in CAD (we use Siemens NX) with the fluency to iterate through architectures and designs quickly.
• Use hand calcs, FEA, clean first-principles thinking and prototyping to bound problems, size parts, and down select between options.
• Design the test fixtures, assembly aids, and inspection tooling that your subsystem needs to be built and validated at rate, while partnering closely with our test engineering team on life-test rigs and end-of-line testers.
• Drive parts, assemblies, and BOMs through release, revision control, and change management with the discipline that a product at scale demands.
• Work closely with our electrical, firmware, thermal, and manufacturing engineers to make sure the mechanical design is tightly-integrated within our system.
• Travel occasionally to suppliers and manufacturing partners (China, Malaysia, Japan, Italy, Germany, Vietnam) to qualify processes, resolve tooling issues, and support production ramps.

What You'll Bring

• BS or MS in Mechanical Engineering, Product Design Engineering, or a related field, with 4+ years of hands-on experience delivering physical products to production.
• A track record of owning at least one complex subassembly or full product end-to-end - from requirements through concept, prototype, validation, tooling, and production.
• Real experience collaborating with industrial designers on a consumer-visible or user-facing product, and a genuine appreciation for what ID brings to the table.
• Demonstrated CAD fluency for system-level ownership - we use Siemens NX; strong Creo, SolidWorks, or CATIA experience translates too.
• Strong fundamentals: load estimation, hand calcs, tolerance analysis, FEA, GD&T, and clean CAD practices.
• Practical knowledge of the manufacturing methods we use on the droid — injection molding, thermoplastic and thermoset composites, EPP foam molding, stamping, CNC machining, and the tooling that goes with them.
• Hands-on prototyping instincts - you're comfortable in a machine shop, at a 3D printer, and building a first article with your own hands before it goes to a supplier.
• The judgment to know when to iterate, when to freeze, and when the design is telling you something the requirements got wrong.

Bonus points for any of the following:

• Prior work on a consumer-visible hardware product where industrial design was a first-class stakeholder
• Experience designing test fixtures, assembly aids, or end-of-line testers alongside the products they support
• Experience carrying a design through tooling kickoff, T0 samples, and production ramp at a contract manufacturer
• Familiarity with electronics integration - flex circuit routing, PCB mounting, thermal control, connectors, sealing
• Experience with high-cycle mechanical reliability and design-for-reliability practices
• Prior work in drone, robotics, automotive, medical device, or consumer electronics NPI

What Else You Need To Know

The starting cash range for this role is $135,000 - $225,000. 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.