About Zipline

Do you want to change the world? Zipline uses drones to deliver critical and lifesaving medicine to thousands of hospitals serving millions of people in multiple countries. Our mission is to provide every human on Earth with instant access to vital medical supplies. Join Zipline and help us make this a reality for billions of people.

About You and The Role

Note: This is a paid opportunity

At Zipline, we thrive on finding elegant solutions to complex problems, given what exists today and what we can develop to maturity quickly and confidently. We stay close to our customers, learn what really works, and find where we can put the leverage to make a big difference for them now. In Guidance, Navigation, Controls, and Dynamics, this means we have to learn to fly differently and build novel solutions in house to enable the kind of quality and responsiveness we need. We’ve flown our small aircraft through every storm in Rwanda and Ghana for years, and learning to survive and deliver through such difficult circumstances, while keeping the team size small and efficient, is what excites us.

The GNC&D team at Zipline is looking to increase its expertise in a variety of different areas. Your role will be focused on improving the capabilities of our current system along with contributing to development of future GNC systems. We want to expand our GNC&D capabilities to ensure we can continue to meet our customer needs all around the world.

What You'll Do

• Develop innovative solutions to improve the operational performance of our current guidance, navigation, and control system.
• Model aircraft sensors and dynamics to support simulation development and engineering trade studies, using first principles and test flight data
• Design onboard integrity checks to communicate when the system performance is degraded
• Analyze flight data to investigate potential regressions and find room for improvements
• Create tools and tests to demonstrate the performance of your designs using both theoretical guarantees and Monte Carlo simulations

What You'll Bring

• General guidance, navigation, and control experience 
• Experience developing embedded control systems, estimators, or simulations from scratch and experience testing these systems on real-world hardware
• Exposure in one or more of the following areas: precision integrated inertial navigation, dynamic modeling of complex systems, linear control analysis, or optimal control with uncertainty
• Excellent applied mathematical fundamentals in linear algebra, probability, and Bayesian estimation
• Software engineering skills, preferably working with both embedded software (C, C++) and technical computing languages/packages (MATLAB, NumPy, Julia, etc.)

Internship Timing

Zipline is always hiring for intern positions. Our minimum internship duration is 10 weeks. Longer internships and co-ops are also encouraged but not required. A longer tenure multiplies impact: you’ll have learned a ton at Zipline in your first several weeks and be able to tackle projects of significant complexity and impact as your internship continues.

What Else You Need To Know

Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, mental or physical disability, medical condition, genetic information, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, military or veteran status, citizenship, or other characteristics protected by state, federal or local law or our other policies.

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!