Head of Weather Systems

Job Description

Job Description

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.

You will lead Zipline's Weather Intelligence team, that defines and enforces the environmental limits under which our aircraft operate safely and reliably. This owner-level role sits at the intersection of meteorology, software, flight operations, and safety. Your work makes automated go/no-go decisions for thousands of missions every day, directly affecting uptime, delivery throughput, customer experience, and regulatory safety posture. You will operate inside a high-velocity global logistics and aviation environment where decisions must be defensible to operators, regulators, and partners, and where system failures have operational and safety consequences.

• Own end-to-end development and operational performance of the automated weather intelligence and risk system used for mission go/no-go decisions across Zipline's operational regions. You are the single technical and product owner for system behavior and reliability.
• Translate meteorological uncertainty into concrete, testable operational limits and encode those into automated decision logic used in daily operations.
• Define and measure success: set quantitative targets (e.g., uptime improvement, false downtime rate, missed-risk rate, delivery throughput impact) and deliver within the first 12 months measurable improvements compared with our first year of commercial operations.
• Lead validation efforts using a combination of simulation, historical log replay, flight test, and live operations; design experiments and acceptance criteria for new models, sensors, and rules before production rollout.
• Prioritize trade-offs across safety margin, operational availability, sensing cost, model complexity, and deployment speed; document failure modes and rollback criteria for all changes.
• Own cross-functional execution with Flight Operations, Safety, Flight Sciences, Simulation, Field Sites, and Engineering: define SLAs, incident roles, and escalation paths for weather-driven incidents.
• Drive the roadmap for sensing (ground and air), data ingestion, model tooling, and runtime decision services; sponsor necessary infrastructure (streaming, simulation, monitoring) to help meet operational SLAs.
• Hire, mentor, and manage a small technical team (3–5 engineers/scientists) or partner with an existing engineering manager while retaining product and technical ownership of the weather system.
• Operate an on-call / incident rotation for weather-system outages; run post-incident reviews, own corrective action plans, and feedback into validation and deployment processes.

• Minimum 6+ years industry experience shipping mission-critical decision systems; demonstrable ownership of automated operational decision logic in production at scale.
• Required technical skills: deep fluency in scientific Python (Pandas, NumPy, Xarray, NetCDF), experience with time-series/streaming systems (Kafka or equivalent), and comfort reading/working with production stacks (Kubernetes, AWS, Rust/C++ codebases). Ability to prototype and ship models into production pipelines.
• Domain expertise: strong working knowledge of meteorology, aviation weather, or related geospatial environmental science; ability to explain physics, uncertainty, and operational implications to non-experts and regulators.
• Systems judgment: experience defining quantitative metrics (false-positive/negative tradeoffs), designing validation experiments (simulation + field tests), and documenting failure modes and rollback criteria.
• Operations intensity: history working with 24/7 operational systems, incident response, and SLAs; comfortable making and owning high-consequence trade-offs under uncertainty.
• Leadership: experience leading or directly influencing small cross-disciplinary teams and driving measurable improvements in uptime, throughput, or reliability within 6–12 months.
• Logistics & constraints: must be able to work onsite in South San Francisco full-time and travel internationally
• Must-have traits: decisive under uncertainty, rigorous about validation and failure modes, able to translate scientific complexity into deterministic operational rules and measurable outcomes.

The starting cash range for this role is $185,000 to $255,000. 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.