Technical Program Manager, Flight Systems Platform

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

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

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