Senior Staff / Manager - Ground Systems Design Concepts and Standardization

About this role

Zipline is looking for a Sr Staff Engineer or Engineering Manager to own and lead the concepts and standardization function for Ground Systems charging-site design. This role will lead a small multidisciplinary team, roughly five to ten people, responsible for defining the basis of design, design templates, pre-engineering decisions, and standard details that allow Zipline to design and deploy sites quickly and consistently.

You will oversee civil, structural, electrical, mechanical, and related engineering contributors who solve the repeatable questions before each site reaches execution: what the standard layouts are, what design assumptions hold, what details should be reused, what tradeoffs should be made once instead of rediscovered site by site, and what constraints must be visible before a design manager starts a permit package. You'll work with partners and leaders across the Operations organization to ensure the site designs facilitate efficient and effective service and maintenance, with the overall goal of a highly available and serviceable site. You'll work with partners and leaders from the construction, finance and engineering teams to ensure the overall site designs meet or exceed our construction cost and schedule targets. 

The right leader combines technical depth with systems thinking. You should be able to set engineering direction, create usable design standards, make pragmatic decisions across disciplines, and build a team that turns ambiguous field and product needs into clear design guidance.

What you'll do

• Lead the Design Concepts and Standardization team responsible for the basis of design for Zipline charging sites and related ground infrastructure.
• Grow, manage and develop a small multidisciplinary team of civil, structural, electrical, and related engineering contributors.
• Create and maintain standard site layouts, design templates, design guides, standard details, engineering assumptions, and pre-engineered solutions that Design Execution can use repeatedly.
• Translate product, operations, construction, service, safety, jurisdictional, and cost requirements into clear design standards and decision frameworks.
• Own the pre-engineering work needed to reduce design cycle time, reduce rework, improve constructability, and make permit and construction packages more predictable.
• Partner tightly with Design Execution so templates and standards are useful in real projects, not theoretical documents that sit on a shelf.
• Build feedback loops from Construction, Project Engineering, Service Operations, Launch, and field teams so recurring issues become better standards, not repeated one-off fixes.
• Define the technical review process for new standards, standard details, site typologies, and major design assumptions.
• Balance standardization with site flexibility, making clear where Zipline should hold a hard standard and where execution teams should adapt to local constraints.
• Improve the cost, buildability, safety, maintainability, and speed of Zipline's site designs through better front-end engineering and standard work.

What you'll bring

• 5+ years experience leading multidisciplinary design, engineering standards, basis-of-design, platform engineering, site development, infrastructure engineering, or similar technical functions.
• Professional degree and experience in civil engineering, structural engineering, electrical engineering, architecture, or a related discipline, with enough breadth to lead across multiple design domains. Experience in EV CHarging, Commercial renewables or other large scale commercial business deploying physical sites and hardware across many metro areas preferred. 
• Experience managing or technically leading small teams, ideally five to ten people, with a mix of direct leadership and technical review responsibility.
• Strong judgment around repeatable physical infrastructure: site layouts, civil works, foundations, structural systems, electrical interfaces, charging infrastructure, constructability, maintainability, permitting, and cost tradeoffs.
• Experience creating design standards, templates, playbooks, design guides, drawing packages, engineering assumptions, or other tools used by execution teams.
• Ability to work across internal teams and external consultants, translating messy requirements into clear technical direction.
• A practical bias toward standards that make teams faster and better, not process for process's sake.
• Comfort operating in a fast-moving environment where the system is still evolving and the standard must improve as Zipline learns from real sites.
• Strong written and verbal communication, especially when explaining technical tradeoffs to design, construction, operations, finance, product, and leadership audiences.