Controls & Dynamics Intern (Summer 2025)

Zipline is on a mission to transform the way goods move. Our aim is to solve the world’s most urgent and complex access challenges by building the first instant logistics system that serves all humans equally. Leveraging expertise in robotics and autonomy, Zipline designs, builds, and operates a fleet of cutting edge, autonomous delivery drones. We serve tens of millions of people around the world.

Joining Zipline’s Emerging Talent program as an intern is an opportunity to contribute to our promise of building a system that provides equitable access to critical healthcare supplies for millions of people. We believe that internships are more than just opportunities to learn by watching or doing low level tasks. We expect our interns to take on meaningful work that actively contributes to moving Zipline’s mission forward, while learning real-world skills that will serve them in their careers for the long term. 

Join us, and build the future of logistics with the best humans around!

About the Guidance, Navigation, & Controls Team

Our Guidance, Navigation, and Controls (GNC) team is at the heart of Zipline’s product success - we are responsible for developing, testing and maintaining some of the critical flight software systems that enable our aircraft to complete missions autonomously, from takeoff through to predicting and executing a successful delivery, through to landing safely and accurately.  We develop novel solutions to give us the responsiveness, robustness and quality we need to ensure our delivery platforms can function in a wide range of increasingly challenging conditions and truly serve everyone in the world equally.

The Role

Zipline’s people 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. 

As an intern on the GNC team, you will learn how we fly autonomous aircraft in a range of challenging flight conditions.  Using data from flight testing and simulation as well as our global fleet of customer aircraft, you will be looking for insights that can help improve our design.  Through this you’ll have the opportunity to make changes to our systems that will measurably improve our product - your work will not just be theoretical; you will have the opportunity to see your contributions fly!

What You'll Do  

• Contribute to the design, implementation, testing and release of innovative flight algorithms that improve the operational performance of our vehicle controllers
• Create tools and tests to demonstrate your design performance and protect against software regressions, using both theoretical guarantees and simulations
• Analyze flight data to assess recent changes and upgrades, looking for regressions and potential areas for future improvement
• Design onboard integrity tests to communicate when the system performance is degraded
• Present key results and changes to the broader engineering team

What You'll Bring 

• Your applied math skills stand out even among aerospace engineers.
• You think simulations and working with hardware are both fun.
• You have owned and developed controls solutions for a team project, thesis, or competition
• 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.
• Software engineering skills, preferably with both embedded software (C, C++) and technical computing (MATLAB, python, Julia, etc.).  Experience with Github and working in a multi-developer environment is an advantage.

What Else You Need to Know