Senior/Staff Electrical Engineer, Dropbox

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 builds and operates autonomous delivery systems that move critical goods reliably and safely. Dropbox is our customer-facing package-loading product that integrates mechatronics, sensors, electronics, access control, user interaction, firmware, and environmental protection so untrained users can hand off packages to our droids.

As a Senior or Staff Electrical Engineer on Dropbox, you will own critical electrical systems from architecture and component selection through detailed design, validation, production ramp, and fleet operation. Your scope will include power distribution, motor and actuator interfaces, sensing, PCBAs, wiring harnesses, connectors, grounding, protection, communications, and system diagnostics.

Dropbox operates unattended in demanding field environments and around untrained users. Its electrical systems must tolerate weather, installation variation, power disturbances, mechanical motion, contamination, service activity, and repeated daily operation while remaining safe and easy to diagnose.

You will work closely with Mechanical Engineering, Firmware, Systems, Safety, Test, Reliability, Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Deployment, and Operations. This is a hands-on individual-contributor role with responsibility for both detailed electrical design and system-level product outcomes.

At the Staff level, you will additionally set the electrical architecture and technical direction across Dropbox generations, establish reusable design standards, and lead resolution of the program’s most complex cross-functional problems.

The work

What You'll Do

• Own critical Dropbox electrical systems from requirements and architecture through production release and field deployment.
• Develop electrical architecture for power distribution, control electronics, sensors, actuators, user interfaces, communications, and service diagnostics.
• Translate product behavior, safety analyses, environmental conditions, mechanical interfaces, and field workflows into electrical requirements.
• Define electrical success metrics such as power consumption, sensing coverage, fault-detection performance, environmental margin, production yield, and field reliability.
• Select and integrate sensors, motors, actuators, motor drivers, power supplies, converters, protection devices, connectors, harnesses, and communications interfaces.
• Design or guide the development of PCBAs, schematics, layouts, cables, wiring harnesses, interconnects, and electrical assembly documentation.
• Own power budgets, grounding and shielding strategy, connector architecture, current-carrying margins, thermal derating, and protection coordination.
• Design for electrical faults including overcurrent, short circuit, reverse polarity, overvoltage, undervoltage, brownouts, electrostatic discharge, connection errors, and loss of communication.
• Partner with Safety and Systems engineers to ensure electrical hazards are controlled through architecture, isolation, protection, sensing, and fault response.
• Work closely with Mechanical Engineering on electronics packaging, cable routing, connector access, environmental sealing, thermal management, strain relief, and serviceability.
• Partner with Firmware engineers to define sensor behavior, actuator interfaces, motor control, state transitions, interlocks, fault detection, telemetry, and recovery.
• Ensure electrical interfaces and configuration are unambiguous across product variants, site installations, and manufacturing builds.
• Perform circuit analysis, power analysis, signal-integrity assessment, tolerance analysis, derating, and worst-case analysis.
• Build prototypes, instrument systems, perform bench testing, and use data to retire technical risk.
• Develop validation plans covering functional performance, power quality, electrical safety, environmental exposure, ingress, thermal cycling, vibration, ESD, EMI/EMC, cable flexing, connector life, and fault injection.
• Lead design reviews, DFMEAs, hazard reviews, and electrical readiness reviews.
• Produce complete schematics, drawings, specifications, interface-control documents, BOMs, test requirements, and release documentation.
• Work directly with suppliers to qualify components, PCBAs, harnesses, connectors, power systems, and manufacturing processes.
• Partner with NPI, Manufacturing, and Quality to develop scalable assembly, inspection, programming, calibration, and end-of-line test processes.
• Support prototype builds, engineering validation, design validation, production validation, and manufacturing ramp.
• Lead investigations of test, production, and field failures using telemetry, logs, electrical measurements, physical inspection, and structured root-cause methods.
• Drive issues from containment through corrective action and verify that fixes measurably reduce recurrence.
• Use fleet data and service records to improve electrical reliability, fault detection, diagnostics, and maintenance procedures.
• Mentor engineers and establish electrical design, documentation, review, and release best practices.
• At the Staff level, identify systemic technical risks, drive cross-generational architecture decisions, and align electrical, mechanical, firmware, test, and manufacturing strategies.

Also

What You'll Bring

• Proven end-to-end ownership of complex electrical or electromechanical products through architecture, validation, production ramp, and field deployment.
• Strong electrical engineering fundamentals across analog, digital, power, sensors, motor interfaces, embedded systems, and communications.
• Experience designing electronics for systems containing motors, actuators, sensors, PCBAs, harnesses, connectors, and embedded controls.
• Demonstrated ability to develop robust power-distribution, grounding, shielding, protection, and interconnect architectures.
• Experience with schematic capture, PCB design reviews, component selection, tolerance analysis, and worst-case circuit analysis.
• Hands-on proficiency with oscilloscopes, multimeters, power analyzers, electronic loads, logic analyzers, current probes, and data-acquisition equipment.
• Experience debugging intermittent problems involving power, signal integrity, connectors, sensors, communications, or firmware interaction.…