Senior/Staff Applied Aerodynamicist

The role

You will drive conceptual design for new vehicles and hardware revisions. You will build aerodynamics plant models, design propellers, and deliver CAD surfaces for mechanical designers. You will also design and maintain test hardware and aero measurement tools.

What you will do

• Conceptual design for new vehicles and hardware revisions of existing platforms
• Building high quality aerodynamics plant models validated through ground- and flight-based testing
• Propeller designs for low noise and high aerodynamic efficiency
• Delivering high quality CAD surfaces for mechanical designers
• Designing and maintaining test hardware and methods including wind tunnels and bench test set-ups
• Designing instrumented flight test assets and aero measurement tools

Required qualifications

• Minimum of 4+ years of industry experience
• Proven record of shipping high quality products
• Detailed flow analysis via Computational Fluid Dynamics using packages such as Fluent, Star-CCM+, openFOAM, powerFlow
• Generative design of three-dimensional aerodynamic objects using advanced surfacing techniques in packages such as CATIA or NX
• Hands-on experimental aerodynamics including wind tunnel testing, flow visualizations, pressure measurements, optical flow diagnostics and load measurement
• Use of low and mid fidelity tools for basic aircraft sizing such as XFOIL, XROTOR, OpenVSP, RCAS
• Fundamental understanding of vortex dynamics, boundary layers, turbulence, finite wing theory, aircraft dynamics, three-dimensional flow separation, propeller theory, aeroacoustics, heat and mass tran

About the company

Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service. They operate an autonomous logistics system to deliver food, medicine and essential goods globally.