Electrical Engineering Manager

South San Francisco, CA | Ground Systems | Full Time

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. Through our robotics and autonomy platforms, we’re decarbonizing delivery, reducing road congestion and emissions, and increasing access to essential goods worldwide.

About the Role

The Ground Systems team at Zipline is in charge of all the infrastructures on the ground supporting our autonomous delivery drones with docking, battery charging, thermal management, ground communication and preflight checks. This role is central to enable our next generation of drone logistics, solving complex challenges in power distribution, power conversion, battery charging, high performance microprocessor, high-speed network communication and system-level integration. 

Zipline is seeking an electrical engineering leader to manage a high performing team of electrical hardware design for the Ground Systems team. This technical leader will guide and grow these teams as well as be able to own parts of the design directly as the team scales. You and your teams will be responsible for architecting and developing custom Printed Circuit Board Assemblies (PCBAs), integrated sensing and RF solutions, and complex industrial systems for our new and existing ground systems hardware and validating the solutions for volume scale. Our ground systems are flight and safety critical. They are installed worldwide, and Zipline will depend on this team to develop novel solutions that enable unprecedented scale and efficiency. Success will depend not only on technical innovation, but also on developing a deep understanding of the needs of our customers.

What you’ll do 

• Be the electrical engineering technical leader for ground systems design including low voltage electronics and PCBA development, power electronics and RF systems 
• Build your teams by hiring and coaching world class electrical engineering design and test teams
• Drive architectural decisions and manage the requirements of the next-generation of Zipline’s ground system hardware to deliver safe, reliable, high volume and low cost products
• Design and validate to relevant North American and international safety and certification standards for scaled deployments

• Allocate resources within your team to the electrical engineering projects 
• Create and manage milestones and deliverables with your team
• Maintain visibility across the hardware your team owns, and have the ability to deep dive into projects and challenges
• Liaise with other technical leaders both within and outside of the Ground Systems Hardware team (Mechanical Design, Embedded Systems, Validation & Test, Field Operations, Supply Chain, Manufacturing and more)
• Leverage your technical leadership experience in hardware design to establish a team culture that biases towards action and tests ideas to achieve radically simple designs
• Motivate your team with a clear vision and create ambitious plans for your team’s work while holding a high bar for technical quality
• Establish best practices, standards, and design and release review processes that enable both high speed development and rigorous execution

What you’ll bring

• 8+ years of demonstrated experience with electronics designs and system integration
• 2+ year leading a technical engineering team, and direct hiring management experience finding great talent
• Experience working with products across various stages of development, from prototype to high volume production
• Ability to operate in ambiguous and fast paced environments with demonstrated experience in handling priorities and collaborating across a complex organization
• Demonstrated expertise with low voltage digital circuit design and/or power electronics design
• You’re hands-on with hardware; you know your way around tools like oscilloscopes and signal generators

Why join Zipline? 

As an Electrical Engineering Manager at Zipline, you’ll be leading the development of the future of global autonomous logistics and delivery. You’ll lead and grow a team of empowered world class engineers with real accountability for real-world outcomes. This is a chance to make a global impact, design products for scale and improve the lives of millions through hardware that works every time. 

If you’re excited by owning tough problems end to end in an ambiguous new industry, you belong here.