Zipline
Head of Systems Engineering
$225K–$275K
South San Francisco, California, USA +1 · Director · Full-time · Posted Jul 14, 2026
- Location
- South San Francisco, California, USA
South San Francisco, California, United States
About the job
Leads systems engineering for Zipline’s autonomous aircraft and logistics platforms, setting product capabilities, architectures, and verification practices to safely scale operations.
What you'll do
- Own product-level requirements, architecture, system decomposition, verification planning, and performance monitoring across core system capabilities.
- Set release standards and test requirements; partner with safety and regulatory teams to demonstrate flight worthiness.
- Lead and mentor the systems engineering team and drive the multi-year technical roadmap.
What they ask for
- Demonstrated leadership delivering complex technical solutions across cross-functional organizations.
- Track record shipping high-reliability, safety-critical autonomous systems into real-world operation.
- Deep systems-engineering experience spanning requirements, architecture, interfaces, decomposition, verification planning, and validation.
- Technical judgment in safety-critical autonomy and principled tradeoffs among safety, performance, cost, and operational constraints.
Pay
$225,000-275,000 USD base salary
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative