Senior Controls Engineer

Company: Zipline
Location: South San Francisco
Posted on: April 2, 2026

Job Description:

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 You and The Role Zipline’s Flight Controls team is responsible for modeling, developing, and testing the tools and critical flight software systems that enable our vehicles to complete deliveries autonomously and that enable Zipline to rapidly iterate and improve our products, while continuing to serve our customers through various environments. We thrive on developing novel solutions to ensure our delivery platforms can function in a wide range of increasingly challenging conditions, ensuring that we serve everyone in the world equally. From pushing the limits of the hardware to informing changes to improve resilience and manufacturing; Fundamental physics based analysis is central to our continued success.In this role you’ll use a range of analysis techniques to understand our system performance and how it is affected by design choices, limitations and requirements, as well as proactively collaborating across teams to drive improvements to our products. Working with the wider team, you’ll use data from flight testing and our global fleet of customer aircraft to improve simulations and develop tools to continually find new insights that will improve our products. By staying close to our customers, you’ll learn what really works and where we should be spending our time to drive our next phase of growth. Success in this role leads directly to improved operational capability of our logistics network What You'll Do Develop dynamic models of complex systems and components that are core to our high fidelity 6DOF simulation. Analyze and improve the performance of existing and future vehicle designs through a combination of simulation and flight tests. Play a key role in deriving and verifying requirements for both hardware components and software interfaces, while balancing the technical need and broader product prerequisites as well as safety and regulatory standards. Identify and develop processes and tools to improve efficiency and protect against regressions. Design and implement onboard integrity tests to monitor how well the vehicle is flying and aid in understanding off-nominal performance and delivery failures, both in research and validation flights, as well as in the production fleet. Work in a high performing team, sharing your experience and improving efficiency while developing the next generation of logistics. What You'll Bring Minimum of 4 years of industry experience designing control, estimation algorithms and implementing them into embedded systems with the help of simulation tools to analyze performance Professional experience in one or more of the following areas: flight dynamics and control, dynamic modeling of complex physical systems, model identification, statistical analysis. Ideally you will have used your skills in these areas to successfully ship one or more complex products. Demonstrate enthusiasm and proficiency in both simulation practices and hands-on work with hardware, spanning from bench-level experimentation to comprehensive flight tests. Software skills in both technical computing (MATLAB, SciPi, Julia, etc) and embedded software (Rust, C, C++), with experience working in a large, complex, multi-developer environment. What Else You Need to Know The starting cash range for this role is $170,000 - $210,000. 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. 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!

Keywords: Zipline, Elk Grove , Senior Controls Engineer, Engineering , South San Francisco, California