Technical Program Manager, Flight Systems Platform
Zipline · San Francisco, United States · 2mo 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
You will be Zipline’s Technical Program Manager for Flight Systems Platform, partnering across Flight Software, Cloud Infrastructure, Data and ML, Autonomy, Maps, Validation, Application Software, and Operations.
You will own the execution of cross-functional platform capabilities that enable Zipline to build, test, deploy, monitor, maintain, and scale a fleet of autonomous aircraft and supporting infrastructure. The portfolio includes a number of top priority initiatives, spanning cloud and on-prem infrastructure, OTA delivery, logging and telemetry, data and ML pipelines, simulation and HIL/SIL environments, CI and developer tooling, maps and serviceability systems, and site-level operational tooling.
You will make dependencies, interfaces, sequencing, and tradeoffs across teams visible and actionable. Your work will improve engineering velocity, validation confidence, fleet availability, operational efficiency, and the safety and reliability of Zipline’s delivery network.
You do not need to be an expert in every platform domain. You should bring strong technical depth in one or more areas and the ability to learn quickly, connect systems-level concerns, and drive decisions across organizational boundaries.
What You'll Do
- Own cross-functional programs from strategy through delivery, defining outcomes, milestones, success metrics, dependencies, risks, and decision points.
- Lead complex migrations, rollouts, and architectural transitions across cloud, on-premise, vehicle, dock, tower, and site environments.
- Drive improvements in platform reliability, scalability, latency, cost, test throughput, developer feedback loops, deployment success, and operational recovery.
- Establish shared readiness criteria for launches and migrations, including validation coverage, observability, rollback plans, operational ownership, and safety-critical dependencies.
- Make cross-functional tradeoffs explicit, balancing safety, reliability, performance, cost, fidelity, delivery speed, and operational complexity.
- Create effective operating mechanisms: program reviews, dependency tracking, risk registers, decision logs, executive updates, and measurable health dashboards.
- Drive incident and postmortem follow-through, ensuring systemic corrective actions are prioritized, owned, measured, and closed.
- Help teams turn shared platform capabilities into repeatable, self-service workflows for engineers, validators, technicians, and operators.
- Manage schedules, resourcing, vendor dependencies, and escalation paths for programs with material impact on fleet or business timelines.
What You'll Bring
- Minimum of 6+ years of technical program management experience owning platform programs (e.g., validation, infrastructure, data, embedded) that served multiple engineering teams; demonstrated ownership of large migrations, automation, or validation initiatives.
- Technical fluency in several of the following: cloud infrastructure, on-premise systems, CI/CD, distributed systems, embedded software, data platforms, ML infrastructure, simulation, hardware-in-the-loop testing, observability, or fleet operations.
- Experience working on a hardware platform (e.g., robotics, automotive, or aviation).
- Track record of shipping measurable velocity and reliability improvements with concrete metrics (e.g., % reduction in build/test time, SLO attainment, HIL throughput gains). Be prepared to share baseline-to-result examples during interviews.
- Strong program control skills: risk registers, Gantt/timeline ownership, rollout/rollback plans, runbooks, and structured postmortems with tracked remediation items.
- Ability to make and defend hard tradeoffs on performance, cost, and safety; experienced at convening technical and ops stakeholders and driving binding decisions.
- Comfortable with operational intensity: on‑call coordination for launches, occasional off‑hours work for field tests/launches, and travel to test or customer sites (up to 10%).
- Location requirement: South San Francisco office presence minimum 4 days/week
- Education/tech background: BS in CS, EE, Systems Engineering or equivalent experience; former software or systems engineer is strongly preferred.
Success in the first 3-6 months
- Scope, plan, and kick off a complex, cross-functional program.
- Deliver one major program milestone: complete a phased migration or rollout that improves a tracked metric (e.g., 10% cloud cost reduction) and pass a launch readiness review.
- Establish program dashboards and SLOs for platform health and developer velocity, and identify top-priority areas for improvement.
What Else You Need To Know
The starting cash range for this role is $165,000 - $210,000. 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; overtime pay; 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.