Senior RF Desense Engineer

Skills this role screens for

About the role

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 is seeking a Senior RF Desense Engineer to lead the architecture, analysis, mitigation, validation, and long-term improvement of RF desense performance across our autonomous aircraft and ground infrastructure. You will own receiver desense engineering from early system architecture through hardware integration, validation, manufacturing, certification, and field deployment. You will work across wireless platforms supporting 4G LTE, 5G NR, GNSS, Wi-Fi, ADS-B, UAT, Bluetooth, ISM radios, emerging Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications, and future air-to-ground communication systems, ensuring receivers maintain robust performance despite increasingly dense RF and electronic environments. This role also owns the end-to-end electromagnetic shielding architecture across Zipline's wireless platforms. You will define shielding strategies spanning RF integrated circuits, front-end modules, connectors, cable harnesses, line-replaceable units (LRUs), subsystem enclosures, and complete products to control both internally generated and externally coupled interference. Working closely with electrical, mechanical, antenna, manufacturing, reliability, and systems teams, you will develop scalable shielding solutions that enable simultaneous operation of multiple high-power transmitters and high-sensitivity receivers—including precision GNSS systems—while meeting aggressive performance, reliability, manufacturability, weight, cost, and product lifetime requirements. While the primary focus of this role is receiver desense, you will also support broader RF coexistence efforts by contributing to system-level interference analysis, radio scheduling strategies, and multi-radio integration. You will collaborate closely with antenna, RF front-end, electrical, embedded software, systems, mechanical, flight test, manufacturing, reliability, certification, and cloud engineering teams to ensure Zipline's wireless systems perform reliably under real-world operating conditions. What You'll Do • Own RF desense architecture, analysis, mitigation, validation, and production support across Zipline aircraft, docks, droids, Zipping Points, and future autonomous logistics platforms. • Develop receiver desense budgets and performance requirements for next-generation wireless platforms. • Identify and mitigate receiver sensitivity degradation caused by onboard transmitters, switching power supplies, processors, high-speed digital interfaces, displays, motors, power electronics, and other electronic subsystems. • Analyze conducted and radiated interference mechanisms including broadband noise coupling, harmonics, spurious emissions, blocking, intermodulation, passive intermodulation, and electromagnetic compatibility. • Characterize RF coupling paths through PCBs, cables, antennas, enclosures, mechanical structures, power systems, and wiring harnesses. • Develop practical mitigation strategies including shielding, filtering, grounding, PCB layout optimization, clock management, power supply noise reduction, frequency planning, and antenna isolation improvements. • Define RF design guidelines that minimize desense risks early in product development. • Define Zipline's end-to-end electromagnetic shielding architecture spanning RF ICs, front-end modules, PCB assemblies, connectors, cable harnesses, LRUs, subsystem enclosures, and complete products. • Develop shielding strategies that minimize self-generated and externally coupled RF interference while balancing size, weight, thermal performance, manufacturability, serviceability, reliability, and cost. • Specify shielding requirements for RF circuits, mixed-signal electronics, switching power supplies, processors, high-speed digital interfaces, motors, and power electronics to prevent receiver degradation. • Design connector and cable interconnect shielding architectures including shield termination, grounding topology, common-mode current control, cable routing, connector selection, and bonding methods to minimize conducted and radiated emissions. • Develop subsystem-level shielding strategies defining enclosure construction, gasket selection, aperture control, seam treatment, venting approaches, conductive coatings, and grounding interfaces to achieve predictable electromagnetic isolation. • Lead product-level shielding architecture to ensure emissions from all subsystems remain below receiver susceptibility thresholds while supporting simultaneous operation of multiple transmitters and sensitive receivers. • Develop shielding methodologies that enable reliable integration of LTE, 5G, GNSS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ADS-B, UAT, ISM radios, telemetry, command-and-control, V2V communications, and future wireless technologies operating concurrently. • Drive shielding design decisions through simulation, laboratory characterization, near-field scanning, EMI/EMC testing, environmental testing, flight testing, and structured root-cause analysis. • Establish shielding design standards, verification methodologies, acceptance criteria, production inspection processes, and long-term design guidelines across Zipline's hardware platforms. • Partner with mechanical engineering to design lightweight, manufacturable shielding solutions that maintain performance over the full environmental and operational life of the product. • Define shielding strategies that protect high-precision GNSS receivers from onboard interference sources, enabling robust positioning performance under simultaneous multi-radio operation and dynamic flight conditions. • Perform RF system analysis including receiver sensitivity, cascaded noise figure, blocking performance, dynamic range, interference budgeting, and system margin analysis. • Collaborate closely with RF front-end and antenna engineers to optimize signal chains, antenna placement, installed performance, and isolation. • Support PCB layout reviews, grounding strategies, shielding implementation, stack-up definition, and design-for-manufacturing activities. • Develop laboratory validation methods using spectrum analyzers, vector network analyzers, vector signal analyzers, signal generators, near-field probes, OTA chambers, EMI receivers, and conducted RF measurements.…