Lead Production Equipment Tooling Design Engineer

Zipline’s Manufacturing Engineering team delivers the production systems that turn autonomous delivery aircraft and their subsystems into reliable, repeatable products at scale.

As the Lead Production Equipment & Tooling Design Engineer based in our South San Francisco manufacturing site, you will own design and deployment of fixtures, workstations, mechanical tooling, and end-of-line test equipment that directly enable aircraft assembly, battery integration, dock components, and flight‑critical subsystems.

This is a hands-on, high-ownership role: ~75% individual contributor designing, building, commissioning, and iterating equipment on the factory floor, and ~25% people and program leadership coordinating priorities, standards, and cross-functional delivery.

Your work determines throughput, first-pass yield, assembly cycle time, and maintenance uptime for production lines that supply field operations and live delivery fleets—mistakes affect fleet readiness and safety-critical performance.

5+ years designing production equipment, fixtures, or custom automation in a high-volume or fast-ramping manufacturing environment; experience with aerospace, drones, medical devices, or safety‑critical electro-mechanical products is strongly preferred.

Demonstrated mastery of GD&T, tolerance analysis, mechanism design, material selection, and failure‑mode thinking for assembly tooling.

Own end-to-end delivery of production equipment and tooling projects for aircraft and electro-mechanical subsystems: requirements, CAD (Siemens NX), detailed drawings, vendor fab oversight, build, commissioning, and production release.

Deliver measurable improvements: drive tooling availability to >95% Uptime, reduce manual assembly cycle time by 20–40% per station, and improve first-pass yield (FPY) on targeted assemblies by >=10% within the first 6–12 months of deployment.

Design and install alignment fixtures, press and torque tooling, ergonomic operator stations, poka‑yoke devices, handling/transport fixtures, and automated EOL test rigs tied to build and test specs for aircraft, battery packs, and docks.

Lead on‑line debugging and rapid root‑cause analysis during launches and ramp phases; be prepared to run weekend or evening commissioning efforts during critical releases.

Create and enforce tooling design standards, GD&T practices, tolerance stacks, and material/process selections that meet safety and maintainability requirements for autonomous hardware.

Mentor and review work of 1–4 tooling engineers and technicians: set priorities, approve releases, run design reviews, and recruit/hire as required.