Concept and Architecture Engineering Contractor

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.

We are kicking off a new, highly confidential product development effort on Zipline’s New Products team. This team includes individuals who architected and developed Zipline’s current systems from their earliest stages, taking ambitious ideas through the process of becoming real, operational products.

We are now embarking on another clean-sheet development effort that we believe has the potential to have a similar level of impact on the future success of the business.

At this earliest stage of the project, we want to bring in a very small number of exceptional external engineers, designers, builders, and creative problem-solvers to work directly alongside the core New Products team. The objective is to inject diverse technical perspectives into the clean-sheet design process, rapidly explore the solution space, challenge our assumptions, and identify unconventional approaches to unusually difficult problems.

This will take the form of an intensive, highly collaborative design sprint running September 28– October 2, 2026 at Zipline’s flight test facility in Half Moon Bay, California. We intend to host no more than two external participants per day, with each participant joining for approximately one to two days.

Holding the sessions at our flight test facility will give participants firsthand exposure to the systems, hardware, and operating environment that provide context for the problems we’re solving. Rather than working from a presentation or abstract problem statement, participants will be able to see how our systems work in practice, ask questions of the people who build and operate them, and use that context to inform their ideas.

• Work directly with members of the New Products team on ambiguous, open-ended technical problems.

• Generate and evaluate concepts from first principles rather than simply iterating on existing solutions.

• Bring lessons, approaches, and intuition from difficult problems solved in other products and industries.

• Rapidly sketch, prototype,