Industrial & Operations Engineer

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.

As an Industrial & Operations Engineer on the Manufacturing Engineering team, you will own factory performance and scaling.

You will take a factory-level view of production—connecting demand, labor, equipment, space, material flow, process capability, and capital investment into an integrated production system. Your job is to understand how the factory performs today, identify what will constrain us tomorrow, and design the systems required to scale.

This is not a reporting or planning-only role. You will spend time on the production floor observing how work actually happens, use data to identify constraints and opportunities, and then drive changes to layouts, staffing models, processes, buffers, equipment, and operating strategies.

You will help answer fundamental questions such as: How much can we build? What is preventing us from building more? What will break as demand increases? Where should we add people, equipment, automation, or space? And what should the factory look like at the next order of magnitude of production?

• Own factory-level performance, scalability, and production system design, connecting individual manufacturing processes into an efficient end-to-end production system.

• Develop and continuously improve factory and line layouts, optimizing workstation design, material presentation, operator movement, equipment placement, and overall material flow.

• Lead time studies, cycle-time analysis, labor modeling, and line balancing to establish production standards and improve labor efficiency.

• Build and maintain capacity models that translate demand forecasts into requirements for labor, equipment, tooling, shifts, floor space, and capital.

• Identify current and future production bottlenecks, quantify