Technical Program Manager- Droid (Structures & Mechanisms)

About this role

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

The droid is the delivery container at the heart of our delivery system. It's what detaches from the aircraft on a tether, descends 300 feet, and places your order on a driveway. It is also the part of Zipline that our customers actually see, hold, and interact with, which makes it one of the most demanding products we build. Every droid has to be beautiful, cheap, quiet, weatherproof, thermally stable, and reliable for tens of thousands of flight cycles - all at once.

We're designing EV3, the next generation of the droid. Between now and the day it enters full-rate production, the droid team will define an architecture, design and prototype dozens of subsystems, qualify a supply chain across three continents, build life-test and ground-test infrastructure, and ramp production from prototypes to thousands of units per week. As the Technical Program Manager for the droid, you will own the schedule, the coordination, and the execution rigor that makes all of that happen on time.

This role sits at the intersection of product definition, systems engineering, and execution. You will work across mechanical, electrical, firmware, thermal, industrial design, test, and manufacturing engineering to guide system-level decisions, resolve technical risks, and ensure that designs translate successfully into real hardware - first in prototypes, then in production, then in the field.

If you enjoy being close to the hardware and on the front lines of execution, working alongside engineers, technicians, and operations teams to bring complex electromechanical systems to life, this role will be a great fit.

We value people who take ownership of outcomes, not just responsibilities; you'll be identifying problems early, driving decisions, and ensuring work gets completed even when challenges fall outside traditional role boundaries.

On any given week, you might facilitate a cross-team architecture review, coordinate a prototype build, unblock a mold tool release with a supplier, or work with test and manufacturing engineers to ensure a new subsystem installs and validates cleanly on the line.

What You'll Do

• Drive the EV3 droid program from architecture through prototypes, qualification, and full-rate production, aligning a small, deeply cross-disciplinary hardware team around clear priorities and execution plans

• Own the master schedule for the droid: identify the critical path, negotiate credible timelines with engineering leads, and communicate risk honestly and early

• Work across mechanical, electrical, firmware, thermal, industrial design, test, and manufacturing domains to guide system-level decisions and ensure designs translate successfully into real-world builds

• Coordinate prototype builds, first-article inspections, tooling releases, and production ramps, ensuring engineering, supply chain, and manufacturing are prepared to execute and capturing lessons learned to improve future programs

• Identify and resolve technical, operational, and organizational bottlenecks that slow the team down, proactively addressing the areas where progress is most at risk

• Facilitate technical discussions, design reviews, and trade studies that help engineering teams converge on effective solutions and clear decisions

• Partner closely with our suppliers and manufacturing partners across China, Malaysia, Japan, Italy, Germany, Vietnam, and the US to ensure droid designs translate into reliable, repeatable production

• Develop lightweight tools, documentation, and operational processes (decision logs, build playbooks, change-control workflows) that help engineering teams move faster and operate with clarity

• Create dashboards to identify failure modes, identify outlying hardware and learn more about what works and what doesn’t in the field

• Drive clear communication of program status, risks, and decisions across engineering, operations, and leadership stakeholders

• Work closely with our test engineers on the development and use of ground test equipment, both our standard test assets (thermal chambers, FvD machines, etc.) and custom-designed hardware (cyclic testers, system level testers, etc.)

What You'll Bring

• 2+ years of experience in technical program management or in a hardware engineering, systems engineering, manufacturing, or technical operations role involving complex hardware systems

• Experience

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