---
title: 'Associate Maintenance Operations Engineering Lead, Test Sites at Zipline'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/associate-maintenance-operations-engineering-lead-test-sites-zipline-esparto-bk1vb8ekjtqr'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-06'
---

# Associate Maintenance Operations Engineering Lead, Test Sites at Zipline 

- **Company:** Zipline 
- **Location:** Esparto California, United States
- **Posted:** 2026-08-20
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-06
- **Apply:** https://www.zipline.com/open-roles/7907661003?gh_jid=7907661003

## Job description

## 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

As an Associate Maintenance Operations Engineering Lead at Zipline’s Flight Test sites, you will help lead maintenance execution across a highly dynamic and technically complex test environment. This role goes beyond day-to-day aircraft maintenance oversight and requires strong judgment, systems thinking, and technical depth to support evolving hardware, off-nominal work, and experimental fleet operations.

You will be responsible for helping drive maintenance readiness, asset availability, hardware modification execution, and continuous process improvement across multiple test fleets with different purposes and configurations. You will partner closely with flight test operators, maintenance leadership, and engineering teams to support maintenance pilots, manage configuration-specific asks, and ensure maintenance operations can scale with the pace of flight test.

This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who is equally comfortable solving technical problems, improving maintenance systems, and supporting frontline execution.

## What You’ll Do

- Support day-to-day maintenance execution across Flight Test sites, helping prioritize work, allocate resources, and resolve operational blockers
- Lead and coordinate complex off-nominal maintenance work, including creating and improving work templates to properly capture, track, and close emerging maintenance tasks
- Help own and action the hardware modification process, including planning, coordination, execution support, documentation, and follow-through across affected aircraft and assets
- Assist with running maintenance pilots and trial workflows, then provide structured feedback to engineering and cross-functional teams to improve maintainability, tooling, documentation, and processes
- Coordinate fleet configuration changes and hardware-specific asks across aircraft with different test purposes, maturity levels, and operational requirements
- Support major asset management across multiple fleets, ensuring parts, tools, aircraft, and support equipment are aligned to operational and test priorities
- Manage return-to-service pipelines, inspection status, backlog, and maintenance readiness for active test aircraft
- Ensure accurate maintenance records, modification documentation, and configuration tracking
- Reinforce high standards for shop floor execution, SOP adherence, safety, and maintenance quality
- Provide technical guidance and day-to-day direction to maintenance technicians as needed
- Support technician onboarding, training, and development in partnership with our Zipline Academy training team'
- Identify gaps in maintenance processes, documentation, and coordination, then help build more scalable systems to support the growing complexity of test operations

## What You’ll Bring

- 3+ years of experience in aviation maintenance, aircraft operations, fleet management, or another highly technical hardware operations environment
- Strong hands-on maintenance and troubleshooting skills, with the ability to operate effectively in a fast-changing test environment
- Demonstrated ability to manage technically complex work beyond routine maintenance execution
- Experience exercising sound judgment in ambiguous situations involving aircraft readiness, hardware changes, or off-nominal maintenance events
- Familiarity with maintenance documentation, configuration control, return-to-service workflows, and operational compliance
- Strong organizational skills and the ability to track multiple priorities across aircraft, assets, and competing site needs
- Ability to work cross-functionally with engineering, operations, and maintenance teams and provide clear feedback that improves hardware and maintenance processes
- Experience mentoring technicians or informally leading work on the shop floor
- Flexibility to support changing priorities, shift-based operations, and a scaling flight test organization

## Preferred Qualifications

- Experience supporting flight test, R&D, prototype, or non-standard fleet operations
- Experience with aircraft modification programs, conformity, or configuration management
- Experience designing or improving maintenance workflows, task templates, or documentation systems
- Experience managing mixed fleets or assets with different mission profiles and maintenance needs
- FAA A&P or equivalent technical certification preferred, but not required

What Else You Need to Know

The starting cash range for this role is $97,000 - $146,000. Please note that this is a target, starting cash range for a candidate who meets the minimum qualifications for this role. The final cash pay for this role will depend on a variety of factors, including a specific candidate's experience, qualifications, skills, working location, and projected impact. The total compensation package for this role may also include: equity compensation; overtime pay; discretionary annual or performance bonuses; sales incentives; benefits such as medical, dental and vision insurance; paid time off; and more.

Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws or our own sensibilities.

We value diversity at Zipline and welcome applications from those who are traditionally underrepresented in tech. If you like the sound of this position but are not sure if you are the perfect fit, please apply! Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.

As set forth in Zipline ’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

## About Zipline 

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Zipline is an American robotics company that operates the world’s largest autonomous drone delivery service, transporting medical supplies, food, and retail goods across multiple continents.
- **Entity Type**: Private (early-stage startup)
- **Headquarters**: South San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: March 2014
- **Founders**: Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, Keenan Wyrobek, Ryan Oksenhorn, William Hetzler

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Logistics / Drone delivery
- **Target customers**: B2B (healthcare systems, governments, retailers like Walmart and Chipotle) and B2C (home delivery via the Zipline app)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: “Build the first logistics system that serves all people equally” – initially focused on saving lives by delivering blood and medicine to remote communities, now expanded to instant urban delivery.

## Products & Services
- **Platform 1 (P1)**: Long-range, rural delivery drone. Carries up to 4 lbs, roundtrip range 120+ miles, cruise speed 60 mph. Uses parachute delivery. Designed for enterprise, government, and healthcare supply chains.
- **Platform 2 (P2)**: Urban/suburban home delivery drone. Carries up to 8 lbs, service radius 10 miles (or 24 miles one way), cruise speed 70 mph. Delivers via a tether from up to 300 ft, allowing contactless drop-off. Launched in 2025 and used for food, retail, and health products.
- **Zipping Points**: Modular ground stations that allow businesses to load orders onto drones without specialized equipment.
- **FlightIQ**: Advanced onboard autonomy and perception suite for safe navigation and delivery.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available
- **Key Metric**: 2 million commercial deliveries completed (as of January 2026) and 130 million autonomous miles flown.[wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipline_(drone_delivery_company))[zipline-fact-sheet](https://www.zipline.com/about/zipline-fact-sheet)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not disclosed in available sources. Key partners include Walmart, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Crumbl, Blaze Pizza, Wendy’s, and many other restaurant brands. In healthcare, works with more than 5,000 hospitals and health centers.
- **Growth Signals**: Expanded into urban home delivery in 2025 (P2) with service in Pea Ridge, Arkansas and 20+ communities in Dallas-Fort Worth. Obtained FAA authorization for beyond visual line of sight operations. Reports 56% decrease in maternal mortality and 66% decrease in missed malaria treatments in served regions.[zipline-fact-sheet](https://www.zipline.com/about/zipline-fact-sheet)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Autonomous drone fleet**: One of the world’s largest commercial deployments of autonomous robots, with custom software running on Nvidia chips.
- **FAA approval**: All operations and aircraft are FAA-approved, including pioneering use of Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic Management (UTM).
- **Quieter than road vehicles**: Drones hover high and descend on a tether, generating noise lower than common neighborhood sounds.
- **Extensive testing**: One of the largest aviation testing campaigns, with operations in rain, wind, and storms.
- **Integrated logistics platform**: Beyond drones, Zipline provides warehousing, inventory management, cold chain storage, and fulfillment software.

## Strategic Focus
- Scaling the Platform 2 urban delivery network across the U.S., particularly through partnerships with major retailers and restaurants.
- Deepening healthcare impact by expanding into new countries and product categories (prescriptions, groceries, convenience items).
- Continuing to reduce delivery times and environmental footprint (0 emissions per delivery, compared to automotive delivery).

## Why Work Here
- **Culture values**: Ownership & Accountability, Direct Feedback & Communication, Continuous Improvement, Customer Obsession, Servant Leadership (as stated on careers page). Emphasis on “Make it matter” and mission-driven work.[careers](https://www.zipline.com/careers)
- **Work environment**: Headquartered in South San Francisco with hardware and software teams. The company assembles its drones in America. Likely on-site given the hardware focus; remote/hybrid policy not explicitly stated.
- **Impact**: Opportunity to work on life-saving technology (60,000+ lives saved) and shape the future of instant logistics.
- **Engineering culture**: Build and iterate on autonomous systems, airspace deconfliction, and large-scale robotics deployments.

## Sources
1. [Zipline Careers](https://www.zipline.com/careers)
2. [Zipline Homepage](https://www.zipline.com/)
3. [About Zipline](https://www.zipline.com/about)
4. [Zipline Fact Sheet](https://www.zipline.com/about/zipline-fact-sheet)
5. [Wikipedia - Zipline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipline_(drone_delivery_company))
6. [Greenhouse Careers Page](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/flyzipline)

## Other roles at Zipline 

- [Senior/Staff Systems Modeling Engineer, Electric Propulsion](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-systems-modeling-engineer-electric-propulsion-zipline-south-san-xvtyrwb7gcss) — South San Francisco California, United States
- [Aircraft Software Integration Intern (Summer 2027)](https://feeny.ai/job/aircraft-software-integration-intern-summer-2027-zipline-south-san-francisco-qzhqteyn3z8h) — South San Francisco California, United States
- [Aircraft Software Integration Intern (Spring 2027)](https://feeny.ai/job/aircraft-software-integration-intern-spring-2027-zipline-south-san-francisco-869y0r4pmkrj) — South San Francisco California, United States
- [People Partner](https://feeny.ai/job/people-partner-zipline-kigali-xhgqah3xea2d) — Kigali, Rwanda
- [Concept and Architecture Engineering Contractor](https://feeny.ai/job/concept-and-architecture-engineering-contractor-zipline-south-san-francisco-ttns1vrthcc8) — South San Francisco California, United States
- [Mechanical Design Engineer - Towers](https://feeny.ai/job/mechanical-design-engineer-towers-zipline-south-san-francisco-california-tcdm0q3t7ex4) — South San Francisco California, United States
- [Director of Industry Standards](https://feeny.ai/job/director-of-industry-standards-zipline-south-san-francisco-california-xfmf6syhmfnh) — South San Francisco California, United States
- [Flight Test Site Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/flight-test-site-lead-zipline-amarillo-texas-yjcn58g0gb1v) — Amarillo Texas, United States
- [Flight Test Operator](https://feeny.ai/job/flight-test-operator-zipline-amarillo-texas-j156mq0pv54x) — Amarillo Texas, United States
- [Launch & Scale Intern (Summer 2027)](https://feeny.ai/job/launch-scale-intern-summer-2027-zipline-south-san-francisco-california-kmcdb5709dg3) — South San Francisco California, United States