Senior Staff / Manager - Ground Systems Design Concepts and Standardization

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 This Role

Zipline is looking for a Sr Staff Engineer or Engineering Manager to own and lead the concepts and standardization function for Ground Systems charging-site design. This role will lead a small multidisciplinary team, roughly five to ten people, responsible for defining the basis of design, design templates, pre-engineering decisions, and standard details that allow Zipline to design and deploy sites quickly and consistently.

You will oversee civil, structural, electrical, mechanical, and related engineering contributors who solve the repeatable questions before each site reaches execution: what the standard layouts are, what design assumptions hold, what details should be reused, what tradeoffs should be made once instead of rediscovered site by site, and what constraints must be visible before a design manager starts a permit package. You’ll work with partners and leaders across the Operations organization to ensure the site designs facilitate efficient and effective service and maintenance, with the overall goal of a highly available and serviceable site. You’ll work with partners and leaders from the construction, finance and engineering teams to ensure the overall site designs meet or exceed our construction cost and schedule targets.

The right leader combines technical depth with systems thinking. You should be able to set engineering direction, create usable design standards, make pragmatic decisions across disciplines, and build a team that turns ambiguous field and product needs into clear design guidance.

What You'll Do

• Lead the Design Concepts and Standardization team responsible for the basis of design for Zipline charging sites and related ground infrastructure.
• Grow, manage and develop a small multidisciplinary team of civil, structural, electrical, and related engineering contributors.
• Create and maintain standard site layouts, design templates, design guides, standard details, engineering assumptions, and pre-engineered solutions that Design Execution can use repeatedly.
• Translate product, operations, construction, service, safety, jurisdictional, and cost requirements into clear design standards and decision frameworks.
• Own the pre-engineering work needed to reduce design cycle time, reduce rework, improve constructability, and make permit and construction packages more predictable.
• Partner tightly with Design Execution so templates and standards are useful in real projects, not theoretical documents that sit on a shelf.
• Build feedback loops from Construction, Project Engineering, Service Operations, Launch, and field teams so recurring issues become better standards, not repeated one-off fixes.
• Define the technical review process for new standards, standard details, site typologies, and major design assumptions.
• Balance standardization with site flexibility, making clear where Zipline should hold a hard standard and where execution teams should adapt to local constraints.
• Improve the cost, buildability, safety, maintainability, and speed of Zipline's site designs through better front-end engineering and standard work.

What You'll Bring

• 5+ years experience leading multidisciplinary design, engineering standards, basis-of-design, platform engineering, site development, infrastructure engineering, or similar technical functions.
• Professional degree and experience in civil engineering, structural engineering, electrical engineering, architecture, or a related discipline, with enough breadth to lead across multiple design domains.
• Experience in EV Charging, Commercial renewables or other large scale commercial business deploying physical sites and hardware across many metro areas preferred.
• Experience managing or technically leading small teams, ideally five to ten people, with a mix of direct leadership and technical review responsibility.
• Strong judgment around repeatable physical infrastructure: site layouts, civil works, foundations, structural systems, electrical interfaces, charging infrastructure, constructability, maintainability, permitting, and cost tradeoffs.
• Experience creating design standards, templates, playbooks, design guides, drawing packages, engineering assumptions, or other tools used by execution teams.
• Ability to work across internal teams and external consultants, translating messy requirements into clear technical direction.
• A practical bias toward standards that make teams faster and better, not process for process's sake.
• Comfort operating in a fast-moving environment where the system is still evolving and the standard must improve as Zipline learns from real sites.
• Strong written and verbal communication, especially when explaining technical tradeoffs to design, construction, operations, finance, product, and leadership audiences.

Compensation and Benefits

The starting cash range for this role is $160,000 - $225,000. Please note that this is a target, starting cash range for a candidate who meets the minimum qualifications for this role. The final cash pay for this role will depend on a variety of factors, including a specific candidate's experience, qualifications, skills, working location, and projected impact. The total compensation package for this role may also include: equity compensation; discretionary annual or performance bonuses; sales incentives; benefits such as medical, dental and vision insurance; paid time off; and more.

Equal Opportunity Employer Statement

Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, mental or physical disability, medical condition, genetic information, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, military or veteran status, citizenship, or other characteristics protected by state, federal or local law or our other policies.

We value diversity at Zipline and welcome applications from those who are traditionally underrepresented in tech. If you like the sound of this position but are not sure if you are the perfect fit, please apply!

Key skills/competency

• Ground Systems Design
• Engineering Standards
• Basis of Design
• Platform Engineering
• Site Development
• Infrastructure Engineering
• Multidisciplinary Team Leadership
• Electrical Engineering
• Civil Engineering
• Structural Engineering