Industrial & Operations Engineer

The role

You will own factory performance and scaling by connecting demand, labor, equipment, space, material flow, process capability, and capital into an integrated production system. You will spend time on the production floor to identify constraints and design systems required to scale.

What you will do

• Own factory-level performance, scalability, and production system design.
• Develop and continuously improve factory and line layouts.
• Lead time studies, cycle-time analysis, labor modeling, and line balancing.
• Build and maintain capacity models for labor, equipment, tooling, shifts, floor space, and capital.
• Identify current and future production bottlenecks and lead changes to increase throughput.
• Define WIP, buffer, queue, and rework strategies.
• Develop scalable operating strategies for products moving from prototype to sustained manufacturing.
• Partner with Manufacturing Engineers and Production teams to define takt time and staffing models.
• Use production data to improve throughput, cycle time, labor efficiency, utilization, WIP, and cost.
• Lead analysis supporting make-versus-buy decisions and build business cases for CapEx investments.

Required qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering, Manufacturing Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Operations Research, Systems Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 3+ years of experience in industrial engineering, manufacturing engineering, operations engineering, production systems, or a comparable environment.
• Strong understanding of production system design, capacity planning, line balancing, takt time, cycle-time analysis, standard work, and manufacturing flow.
• Demonstrated experience performing time studies and translating observations into labor and capacity models.
• Experience designing or improving manufacturing layouts and material-flow systems.
• Strong analytical skills to turn imperfect production data into engineering and business decisions.
• Experience identifying manufacturing constraints and driving improvements in throughput, productivity, utilization, lead time, or cost.
• Ability to build financial and operational models for CapEx, automation, make/buy, and factory-scaling decisions.
• Strong spreadsheet and data-analysis skills.
• Comfort working with manufacturing data from ERP, MES, labor-tracking, and production systems.
• Ability to work directly on the factory floor.
• Strong communication skills.

Nice to have

• Experience scaling a complex electromechanical product from NPI or low-rate production into higher-volume manufacturing.
• Experience with discrete-event simulation, optimization, operations research, or other production-system modeling techniques.
• Experience with SQL, Python, BI tools, or other methods for analyzing large manufacturing datasets.
• Experience with ERP and MES platforms and developing manufacturing dashboards or operational reporting systems.
• Experience developing business cases for automation or major manufacturing equipment.
• Experience with Lean manufacturing concepts, Theory of Constraints, PFMEA, value-stream mapping, or structured continuous-improvement methodologies.
• Experience supporting factory expansions, new production lines, or greenfield manufacturing operations.

Benefits

• Equity compensation
• Discretionary annual or performance bonuses
• Sales incentives
• Medical insurance
• Dental insurance
• Vision insurance
• Paid time off

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.