Zipline International Inc.
Mechanical Design Engineer - Towers
South San Francisco, California, USA
Stay score
odds of building a lasting career here
Thin sponsorship signal and lottery-bound (~15% per draw). A low-probability bet with your clock running. Prioritize cap-exempt roles and proven entry-level sponsors first.
Lottery odds assume a STEM candidate.
Personalize to your clock →H-1B wage level
the lottery is wage-weighted — each level is one more entry
The bottom of this range ($20,000) is below the Level I prevailing wage of $110,510. An H-1B cannot be filed below the prevailing wage, so an offer at the floor of this band could not be sponsored as posted.
DOL prevailing wage, 2026-27 wage year · Mechanical Engineers (17-2141) · San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA. Wage level is derived by USCIS from the offered wage, occupation and worksite; the occupation shown is inferred from the job title.
Employer immigration record
from this employer's Department of Labor filings
Files H-1B transfers
Sourced from Department of Labor LCA, PERM and prevailing-wage disclosure data. Employer matching is by name, so figures may be split across an employer's legal entities. Absence of a filing means none appears in our copy of the data, not that none exists.
Community outcomes
No reports yet — be the first to help the next applicant.
About the role
- About Zipline Zipline is the world's largest and most experienced drone delivery service.
- 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.
- The drone is only 15% of what we've built to enable seamless, reliable, global operations.
Responsibilities
- As a Senior Mechanical Design Engineer, you will use engineering fundamentals to develop innovative products for our ground systems infrastructure.
- Hand calcs guide your thinking and designs and help you quickly bound a problem.
- This will include design of structural components, mechanisms, and electronics integration.
- As a member of our core design team, you will make important decisions about the product architecture and create designs that will enable practical scale on a short timeline that will meet high product reliability targets.
- Collaboration cross functionally will be key with electrical, software, civil, NPI and supply chain teams to bring your designs to production and into the field.
- Strong fundamentals: load estimation, classic mechanics, structural hand calcs to guide part sizing, FEA and clean CAD designs.
- Familiarity with mechanism design and the integration of electrical components into hardware products
- Disciplined processes: Your parts are released, BOMs are maintained, SOPs created for builds, and timelines are up-to-date
- Knowledge in applying appropriate FOS and margin to human safety critical application (design margin tables, structural joint calculations)
- We design, build, and operate the world's largest autonomous logistics system, delivering critical supplies quickly and reliably.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering
- Excellent problem solving - you are tenacious and scientific in your approach while able to quickly explain concepts to others
- You have true expertise in one area that will level up the team
- You know how to tailor to your audience with the right level of technical depth to be as effective as possible, including using basic tools in place of full CAD when it makes sense
- You are comfortable solving complex problems with little direction and maximum autonomy.
Nice to have
- Ability to periodically ( Nice to Have
Compensation
- The total compensation package for this role may also include: equity compensation; discretionary annual or performance bonuses; sales incentives; benefits such as medical, dental and vision insurance; paid time off; and more.
Benefits
- With more than 140 million commercial autonomous miles safely flown, Zipline is redefining access to healthcare, consumer products, and food across the globe.
Company info
- We are on a mission to serve all humans equally by ensuring access to food, medicine and essential goods anytime, anywhere.
- We are seeking people who sculpt from first principles, enjoy facing adversity, and can do the impossible at record breaking speeds.
- We're looking for an engineer that does not let "how it is normally done" artificially limit the potential solution space, by leveraging experiences, knowledge, and first principles thinking towards problem solving to create an optimal product.
- We are looking for an experienced mechanical engineer to own the design of the entire system and subassemblies for the next generation of our towers.
This listing is sourced directly from Zipline International Inc.'s careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.