Senior Motor Electromagnetic Engineer

The role

You will develop and own analytical and numerical modeling and validation capabilities for electric machines. You will build a motor-modeling framework to optimize motors as part of the complete aircraft system.

What you will do

• Develop, validate, and maintain electromagnetic models for propulsion and auxiliary motors.
• Build a reusable library of motor models, material data, and simulation results.
• Generate torque-speed envelopes, efficiency maps, and loss breakdowns.
• Create scalable design-space clouds and perform sensitivity and uncertainty studies.
• Develop reduced-order and surrogate models for aircraft optimization and mission simulation.
• Integrate motor models with inverter, battery, propeller, thermal, and aircraft mission models.
• Evaluate motor architectures and emerging technologies using first-principles analysis.
• Optimize designs for efficiency, mass, torque density, and reliability.
• Develop model-validation plans and execute dynamometer experiments.
• Analyze measurement uncertainty and discrepancy between simulation and experiment.

Required qualifications

• Master’s degree or PhD in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, applied physics, or a related field, with a focus on electric machines, electromagnetics, optimization, or electric powertrain
• Strong understanding of electric-machine fundamentals, including magnetic circuits, winding theory, d-q models, saturation, harmonics, losses, thermal effects, and permanent-magnet behavior.
• Significant experience developing and interpreting finite-element and reduced-order models of electric machines.
• Experience with Motor-CAD or similar software (JMAG, Maxwell, COMSOL, etc) for electromagnetic, thermal, and performance modeling of electric machines.
• Strong proficiency in MATLAB for model development, automation, optimization, data analysis, and visualization.
• Experience generating motor maps or reduced-order models for system simulation, controls, or powertrain optimization.
• Hands-on experience planning and executing electric-motor dynamometer tests for characterization or model validation.
• Experience defining test matrices, selecting appropriate measurements and instrumentation, and interpreting experimental data.
• Experience correlating electromagnetic models against dynamometer or hardware test results.
• Understanding of experimental uncertainty, repeatability, sensor accuracy, and their impact on model validation.
• Strong first-principles problem-solving skills.
• Ability to communicate complex technical results clearly across engineering disciplines.

Nice to have

• Experience with aerospace, electric aviation, robotics, automotive traction, or other mass- and efficiency-constrained applications.
• Experience optimizing multiple motor types across a common vehicle or product platform.
• Experience with Motor-CAD (or similar software) python scripting, MATLAB-based optimization workflows, and automated generation of large motor design spaces.
• Familiarity with additional electromagnetic tools such as Ansys Maxwell, JMAG, etc.
• Knowledge of motor-control techniques, inverter limitations, field weakening, sensorless control, and fault-tolerant operation.
• Experience with high-accuracy motor characterization, including efficiency mapping, back-EMF measurement, torque constant, winding resistance, inductance, loss separation, thermal characterization, or
• Familiarity with torque transducers, power analyzers, encoders, temperature instrumentation, data-acquisition systems, and other common motor-dyno instrumentation.
• Familiarity with thermal-network models, computational fluid dynamics, structural analysis, rotor dynamics, or electromagnetic noise and vibration.
• Experience with multi-objective optimization, design of experiments, uncertainty quantification, surrogate modeling, or machine-learning-assisted design exploration.
• Experience building internal engineering tools, simulation pipelines, databases, or cloud-based computational workflows.

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 design, build, and operate the world’s largest autonomous logistics system to deliver critical supplies.