Zipline
Controls Engineer, Production Equipment
$140K–$160K
South San Francisco, California, USA +1 · Full-time · Posted Oct 29, 2026
- Location
- South San Francisco, California, USA
South San Francisco, California, United States - Experience
- 2+ years required; 5–7 years preferred.
- Education
- Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering or equivalent practical experience.
About the job
Develops, integrates, commissions, and improves controls and electrical interfaces for production equipment used to manufacture and test Zipline aircraft, batteries, docks, and related subsystems.
What you'll do
- Develop and validate equipment sequences, interlocks, sensor and actuator interfaces, and fault recovery; diagnose issues during builds, commissioning, and production.
- Own controls delivery from requirements through vendor build, acceptance, commissioning, and production release, coordinating across engineering, quality, and operations teams.
- Improve tooling availability, assembly cycle time, and first-pass yield through equipment design, factory-floor debugging, and root-cause analysis.
What they ask for
- 2+ years designing production equipment, fixtures, or custom automation in a high-volume or fast-ramping manufacturing environment.
- Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering or equivalent practical experience.
- Demonstrated mastery of GD&T, tolerance analysis, mechanism design, material selection, and failure-mode thinking for assembly tooling.
- Hands-on factory-floor equipment commissioning experience, with practical knowledge of pneumatics, actuators, sensors, linear motion, machine guarding, and industrial electrical interfaces.
Nice to have
- 5–7 years of relevant experience.
- Experience with aerospace, drones, medical devices, or safety-critical electro-mechanical products.
Pay
$140,000-$160,000 USD starting cash range; base salary or total pay not specified.
Tools
Siemens NX, SolidWorks, Creo, GD&T
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative