Strategic Finance Manager, Operations
Zipline · San Francisco, United States · 1mo ago
About Zipline
Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service. We are on a mission to serve all humans equally by ensuring access to food, medicine and essential goods anytime, anywhere. We design, build, and operate the world’s largest autonomous logistics system, delivering critical supplies quickly and reliably. Today, Zipline operates on four continents, makes a delivery somewhere in the world every 30 seconds, and has completed millions of deliveries to date, including blood, vaccines, medical supplies, food, and retail products.
Our customers include the world’s largest and most prominent healthcare systems, governments, retailers, restaurants and global businesses who rely on us to save lives, reduce emissions, increase economic opportunity, and provide delivery from point A to point B as fast as possible. The drone is only 15% of what we’ve built to enable seamless, reliable, global operations.
Our system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and gives people time back. With more than 140 million commercial autonomous miles safely flown, Zipline is redefining access to healthcare, consumer products, and food across the globe.
We operate at a global scale and are looking for practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth. Our team is motivated by building systems that have a direct, meaningful impact on people’s lives and by scaling the future of logistics. We are seeking people who sculpt from first principles, enjoy facing adversity, and can do the impossible at record breaking speeds.
About You and The Role
We are looking for a Strategic Finance Manager, Operations to serve as a senior finance partner to Zipline’s operations focused on our next generation precise delivery platform.
In this role, you will help Zipline understand and improve the financial performance of its operations across maintenance, flight operations, material planning, supply chain, demand planning, customer support, safety, flight test, real estate, ground systems, launch, and business operations.
You will own core planning and reporting processes, including forecast versus actuals, annual forecasting and consolidation, operating performance reviews, and high priority ad hoc models that support leadership decisions. You will work directly with business partners to understand their goals, processes, constraints, and tradeoffs, then translate that operating context into clear financial insight.
The right person will be expected to take ambiguous operational questions, structure the analysis, build the model, pressure test assumptions, align stakeholders, and help drive decisions.
What You'll Do
- Serve as a strategic finance partner to Global Operations leaders across teams such as Maintenance, Flight Operations, Material Planning, Supply Chain, Logistics, Customer Support, Safety, Flight Test, Business Operations, Real Estate, Ground Systems, and Launch.
- Own forecast versus actuals for multiple teams within Operations, including variance analysis, KPI reporting, financial performance reviews, and clear communication of business drivers.
- Lead annual planning and quarterly forecasting and consolidation processes, partnering with business leaders to translate operating plans, resource requirements, and strategic priorities into financial plans.
- Build and maintain driver-based models for operating forecasts, long-range planning, unit economics, site performance, launch economics, utilization, labor, materials, support costs, and operational efficiency.
- Develop high priority ad hoc analyses and decision models for leadership, including questions related to growth, margin, resource allocation, launch timing, operating model design, and cost optimization.
- Partner with operators to understand the broader financial implications of their goals, processes, constraints, and proposed changes.
- Analyze cost drivers across labor, maintenance, materials, fleet operations, ground systems, support, real estate, site preparation, launch costs, utilization, and delivery economics.
- Identify opportunities to improve margin, reduce cost, increase utilization, improve forecast accuracy, and scale operations more efficiently.
- Build repeatable reporting tools, dashboards, and planning workflows that improve visibility, reduce manual work, and increase accountability.
- Partner with Accounting, Procurement, Supply Chain, Data, Product, Engineering, and Operations to improve planning processes, reporting accuracy, spend visibility, and decision making speed.
- Translate complex analyses into clear recommendations for senior finance and operations leaders.
- Proactively surface risks, decision points, and tradeoffs rather than waiting for perfect data or explicit direction.
What You'll Bring
- 5–10 years of experience in strategic finance, corporate finance, operations finance, FP&A, investment banking, private equity, consulting, business operations, or another highly analytical role.
- Deep financial modeling experience, including forecasting, scenario analysis, unit economics, P&L analysis, capex and opex planning, investment evaluation, and return-on-investment analysis.
- Strong financial judgment and the ability to evaluate tradeoffs across growth, margin, capital allocation, operational scale, timing, and complexity.
- Advanced Excel or Google Sheets skills, with the ability to build clean, dynamic, scalable models that others can understand and use.
- Strong business-partnership skills, including the ability to work directly with operators, understand operational realities, and translate them into financial insight.
- Experience owning forecasting, annual planning, consolidation, variance analysis, and recurring business-performance reviews.
- Comfort working with large datasets and partnering with Data teams. Experience with SQL, Snowflake, dbt, Looker, Mode, Tableau, Hex, Python, or R is a plus.
- Strong communication skills, including the ability to explain financial tradeoffs to non-finance partners and operational realities to Finance leaders.
- The ability to operate effectively in ambiguity, work with imperfect data, and create structure where processes are still being built.
- High ownership, low ego, and strong curiosity. You are willing to ask basic questions, go deep on operational details, and move work forward across teams without formal authority.
- Experience in hardware, logistics, aviation, robotics, manufacturing, supply chain, fleet operations, healthcare devices, physical infrastructure, or another operations-intensive business is strongly preferred, but not required.
You May Be a Strong Fit If
- You are energized by business problems where the answer is not obvious and the data is not perfectly packaged.
- You can move fluidly between a detailed financial model, a conversation with an operator, anda recommendation to senior leadership.
- You know how to build models that are rigorous enough to support major decisions but practical enough to be used by the business.
- You are comfortable challenging assumptions while still building trust with business partners.
- You want to understand how the operation actually works, not just how it appears in a spreadsheet.
- You can distinguish between spending that accelerates scale and spending that adds complexity without enough return.
What Else You Need To Know
The starting cash range for this role is $140,000 - $200,000. Please note that this is a target, starting cash range for a candidate who meets the minimum qualifications for this role. The final cash pay for this role will depend on a variety of factors, including a specific candidate's experience, qualifications, skills, working location, and projected impact. The total compensation package for this role may also include: equity compensation; discretionary annual or performance bonuses; sales incentives; benefits such as medical, dental and vision insurance; paid time off; and more.
Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws or our own sensibilities.
We value diversity at Zipline and welcome applications from those who are traditionally underrepresented in tech. If you like the sound of this position but are not sure if you are the perfect fit, please apply!
Voluntary Self-Identification
For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.
As set forth in Zipline ’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.