Niraj Merchant Email & Phone Number

South San Francisco, California, United States

Responsible for validating Zipline’s drone docking capabilities by building automated testers, running validation testing and building software infrastructure for our validation campaigns.- Hired a team of 12 mechanical engineers, software engineers and test technicians to validate the Ground Systems on Zipline’s Platform 2 drone delivery platform.- Improved docking failure rate from 1 in 20 to 1 in 5,000 through 20+ hardware and software modifications to the system.- Designed an automated GPS fixture that performs a localization survey of the landing pad, reducing survey time from 6 hours to 10 minutes.- Designed an indoor docking cycling process to de-risk landing dynamics by spoofing GPS data using a motion capture system that injected localization data into the drone’s navigation stack.- Drove prototype testing to de-risk electromechanical system behaviors, including camera clearing, landing pad latching and thermal system PID control.- Built out 30+ electromechanical testers to validate the dock and site infrastructure components. Conducted proof loading, temp cycling and simulated environmental conditions like snow, dust, corrosion, humidity.- Developed a custom test tracking framework in Jira to validate 100+ requirements and to log issues found during field testing, now used by company-wide test teams.

South San Francisco, California, United States

- Validated dock geometry through iterative testing by designing a dock - drone interface and flight testing. Conducted 10+ iterations of geometry and 100+ flight tests to narrow down design and de-risk architecture.- Validated Platform 1 Launcher V3 by running 150k cycles of the launcher system in a temperature controlled container. Designed the fixturing, wrote test plans, executed testing and analyzed data to ship in < 6 months.

Fremont, California, United States

Led a team of 2 engineers responsible for designing and building manufacturing equipment for Solar Roof. Our responsibilities included ramping manufacturing, speeding up roof installs and automating roof inspections.- Designed a manufacturing-friendly junction box, allowing labor and BOM annualized savings of $10M.Removed the need of a visual inspection for the solder station in the manufacturing line by improving process reliability. This reduced headcount and realized annualized savings of $1M.- Worked on pottant downselection and electrical wire connection in order to simplify manufacturing for system-level electrical components, resulting in a 5% headcount reduction and annualized savings of $400k- Owned the equipment and manufacturing processes for the mounting hardware and electrical connections on the Solar Roof line in Buffalo, NY.

Fremont, California, United States

- Worked with an external vendor to design and commission a 5 robot cell to manage adhesive dispense, press, plasma clean, flux dispense and a cure buffer - link- Scaled solar roof production by 50x over a short 9 month period by designing, building, commissioning and qualifying equipment for 7 processes on 3 different lines- Ramped up solar roof installations by developing scheduling and BOM generation programs to reduce part shortfalls at job sites and fully utilizing install crew - link- Drove development of new software to simplify programming adhesive dispense tool path programming driving recipe tuning time down by 75%- Developed a plasma clean process to help promote adhesion between adhesive and plastic allowing for longer life of parts on the roof

Santa Clara, Ca

• Led a team to develop a unique method to calibrate multi-zone heaters using pyrometry (Patent Pending)– Designed the assembly of 30+ components using NX (Unigraphics) and validated designs using ther-mal modeling.– Cut the cost of the calibration mechanism by 50% while increasing the accuracy by 30%– Worked with the process team in order to qualify the process results of the new calibration method, leading to a 20% improvement in initial wafer uniformity.– Worked with the software team to develop an algorithm to completely automate the calibration, previously a 3+ hour manual process• Developed a new plasma chamber to enable a pre-clean process– Led the qualification of the new chamber, driving more than $10M of new orders.– Worked with suppliers in order to optimize parts for cost and manufacturability.– Owner of the master model and the BOM for the chamber, allowing the components to be easily tracked and improvements propogated to other chambers.– Travelled to customer site in order to work with the customer to optimize process results on the chamber resulting in successful chamber build.• Designed the next generation Lamp Based Anneals Tool– Boosted power availability by 4X– Used CFD modeling to improve cooling efficiency by optimizing the cooling channels – Validated the robustness of the design using FEA– Performed modal analysis to validate chamber frame design.

Chino, Ca

• Tested to support calibration of upcoming models of Hyundai and Kia cars in the USA.• Developed a MATLAB program which cut processing time from hours to minutes.• Helped Organize a customer clinic to compare consumer response between two variations of Idle Stop and Go systems

Bengaluru Area, India

• Developed a kinematic model of a flywheel governor for a diesel engine in MATLAB. Did feasibilitystudy to determine whether the precision of this governor fitted the spec for a diesel genset.• The code was presented in the Mathworks User Conference, Bangalore, 2010• Created a model to determine heat flow past a fuel injector

Bachelor'S Degree, Mechanical Engineering

Bachelor'S Degree, Materials Science

High School Diploma

High School Diploma