Senior Hardware Reliability Engineer - Design for Reliability

Location: South San Francisco
Team: Engineering | Hardware Reliability

About Zipline

Do you want to change the world? Zipline is on a mission to transform the way goods move. Our aim is to solve the world’s most urgent and complex access challenges by building, manufacturing and operating the first instant delivery and logistics system that serves all humans equally, wherever they are. From powering Rwanda’s national blood delivery network and Ghana’s COVID-19 vaccine distribution, to providing on-demand home delivery for Walmart, to enabling healthcare providers to bring care directly to U.S. homes, we are transforming the way things move for businesses, governments and consumers.

The technology is complex but the idea is simple: a teleportation service that delivers what you need, when you need it. Using robotics and autonomy, we are decarbonizing delivery, decreasing road congestion, and reducing fossil fuel consumption and air pollution, while providing equitable access to billions of people and building a more resilient global supply chain.

Join Zipline and help us to make good on our promise to build an equitable and more resilient global supply chain for billions of people.

About the Role

As a Design for Reliability Engineer at Zipline, you will be responsible for defining and delivering the Safety and Reliability attribute of our latest drone-delivery systems. You’ll combine deep knowledge of failure phenomena in electromechanical devices, hands-on experimentation, and statistical modeling to ensure Zipline’s latest drone-delivery platforms survive the most demanding environments on Earth.

Your work will span from early architecture decisions, like where to apply redundancy, fail-operational strategies, and fault tolerance through the definition of accelerated tests, coding reliability models, and verification methods. You’ll uncover risks early, provide data to risk-based decisions, and guide design teams with clear, actionable recommendations. In doing so, you’ll directly shape the long-term reliability and safety of Zipline’s autonomous aircraft.

What You’ll Do:

Define Quantitative Reliability Requirements

• Translate system-level targets (availability, cost-per-delivery) into measurable reliability specs and operating stress profiles that can be tested.

Mitigate Program, Operational, and Safety Risks

• Lead DFMEA to identify failure modes early; apply analytical FTA to influence architecture for redundancy, fault tolerance, and fail-operational behavior.
• Use HALT, DOE, and rapid A/B testing to uncover design weaknesses and improve robustness, manufacturability, and maintainability.

Predict Reliability Performance

• Develop accelerated life tests using applied physics-of-failure to potential design risks using real-world data to forecast lifetime reliability and safety margins.
• Apply Bayesian statistics (survival analysis, Weibull analysis) to service and connected fleet data in order to predict failure rates as a function of time.

Demonstrate and Verify Reliability

• Author Design Verification Test plans, define acceptance criteria, and specific test parameters necessary to prove reliability requirements are met.
• Evaluate changes from previous testing, and where necessary, define revalidation and program release gates across iterative design cycles to ensure consistent reliability performance.

Basic Qualifications:

• BS/MS/PhD in Mechanical, Electrical, Materials Science, or related field, with 5+ years of experience in design, reliability, or validation engineering.
• Deep knowledge of the mechanisms of failure and how to prevent them through robust design.
• Practical experience designing and executing correlated lifetime testing: corrosion, heat, humidity, thermal cycling, and vibration testing.
• Proficiency in reliability statistics and modeling: (Weibull/survival analysis, DOE, FMEA, FTA, and reliability growth analysis).
• Skilled in data analysis and scripting tools to analyze large vast datasets and forecast outcomes (Python, Reliasoft, Minitab, JMP, or MATLAB).

Nice to have:

• Proven experience scaling complex safety-critical systems operating in harsh environments.
• Strong communication and leadership skills with a track record of influencing design, manufacturing, and operational decisions across mechanical, electrical, and software disciplines.
• Ability to partner with suppliers to ensure reliability requirements are understood, tested, and met.
• A proactive, systems-level mindset that drives issues to resolution and builds organizational reliability culture.

What Else You Need to Know