Senior Controls Engineer

About Zipline 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. About You and The Role Zipline’s Flight Controls team is responsible for modeling, developing, and testing the tools and critical flight software systems that enable our vehicles to complete deliveries autonomously and that enable Zipline to rapidly iterate and improve our products, while continuing to serve our customers through various environments. We thrive on developing novel solutions to ensure our delivery platforms can function in a wide range of increasingly challenging conditions, ensuring that we serve everyone in the world equally. From pushing the limits of the hardware to informing changes to improve resilience and manufacturing; Fundamental physics based analysis is central to our continued success.In this role you’ll use a range of analysis techniques to understand our system performance and how it is affected by design choices, limitations and requirements, as well as proactively collaborating across teams to drive improvements to our products. Working with the wider team, you’ll use data from flight testing and our global fleet of customer aircraft to improve simulations and develop tools to continually find new insights that will improve our products. By staying close to our customers, you’ll learn what really works and where we should be spending our time to drive our next phase of growth. Success in this role leads directly to improved operational capability of our logistics network What You'll Do Develop dynamic models of complex systems and components that are core to our high fidelity 6DOF simulation. Analyze and improve the performance of existing and future vehicle designs through a combination of simulation and flight tests. Play a key role in deriving and verifying requirements for both hardware components and software interfaces, while balancing the technical need and broader product prerequisites as well as safety and regulatory standards. Identify and develop processes and tools to improve efficiency and protect against regressions. Design and implement onboard integrity tests to monitor how well the vehicle is flying and aid in understanding off-nominal performance and delivery failures, both in research and validation flights, as well as in the production fleet. Work in a high performing team, sharing your experience and improving efficiency while developing the next generation of logistics. What You'll Bring Minimum of 4+ years of indus