# Mechanical & Scaling Engineer, Droid at Zipline

- Company: Zipline
- What the company does: Zipline delivers food, groceries, and medicine in minutes with fast, reliable, zero emission delivery. Backed by Sequoia and Techstars.
- Company website: https://flyzipline.com/
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Mid level
- Location: South San Francisco, California, USA
- Work setup: On-site
- Pay: $175K to $215K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-08-17
- Apply by: 2026-10-14
- Apply: https://www.zipline.com/open-roles/7888589003?gh_jid=7888589003
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/zipline-mechanical-and-scaling-engineer-droid/

## About the role

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

## What they're looking for

- Take droid subsystems from the design phase through DVT, PVT, tooling release, first-article, and full-rate production, owning the execution end-to-end
- Own test campaigns for the subsystems you drive. That will involve writing test plans, coordinating fixtures, running the campaigns, and driving root-cause when things fail
- Stand up NPI and production lines at our contract manufacturers. So - process definition, work instructions, operator training, line balancing, yield ramp, and the first weeks of full-rate production
- Be the point person for supplier communication, ECOs, deviation management, and the Jira / issue-tracking hygiene that keeps a hardware program from drowning in itself
- Partner directly with the design engineers, test engineers, and the TPM on our team, and with cross-functional partners in supply chain, quality, and manufacturing engineering
- Drive first-article builds and pilot runs, being physically present on the line, catching problems the drawings didn't anticipate, and closing the loop with the design team

Tags: Hardware

Source: 1752vc Careers, https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/zipline-mechanical-and-scaling-engineer-droid/