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Technical Program Manager Cloud Infra, Data, Validation Platforms

South San Francisco, California, USA

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 Cloud, Data & Validation Platforms, part of the Program Management team, and partnering day-to-day with Cloud Infrastructure, Data, Maps, Autonomy, Validation, and Operations. This role owns execution of the platform capabilities that enable safe, repeatable launches and fleet scale: cloud and on‑prem infrastructure, data ingestion and analytics pipelines, CI/CD and developer productivity systems, simulation and hardware‑in‑the‑loop (HIL) validation environments, and telemetry/logging backplanes. Your work directly affects fleet availability, launch cadence, and safety validation—delays or regressions reduce delivery reliability to hospitals, retailers, and government customers. You will be based in South San Francisco, expected onsite at least 4 days/week, and available for occasional evening or weekend launch windows and incident response.

What You'll Do

  • Own end-to-end programs with clear, measurable outcomes: define goals, milestones, success criteria and delivery schedules for platform initiatives spanning cloud/on‑prem migrations, data pipeline reliability, CI/CD latency reductions, and HIL throughput improvements.
  • Deliver against concrete targets (examples to own and drive): reduce full build+test cycle by 30% within 6 months for targeted teams; increase simulation/HIL test throughput by 2x in 9 months; raise pipeline data freshness to <5 minutes for critical telemetry; achieve 99.9% platform availability for developer environments during release windows.
  • Prioritize and sequence work across infra, data, autonomy, validation, product, security and field ops; resolve cross-team tradeoffs (cost vs. latency vs. fidelity) and enforce rollout readiness gates tied to launch criteria.
  • Lead migrations and rollouts: own migration plans, rollback strategies, runbooks, operator training, and phased rollout checklists for on‑prem/cloud changes affecting validation or production fleets.
  • Set and report program metrics: create dashboards, define SLIs/SLOs/SLAs, run weekly program reviews, and present progress, risks and mitigations to senior leadership.
  • Drive operational readiness and incident follow‑through: coordinate pre-launch readiness reviews, lead postmortems, and track remediation through closure with owners.
  • Harden dev productivity and CI/CD: introduce build caching, parallelization, and infra automation to cut developer feedback loops; own vendor vs. build tradeoffs when selecting tooling.
  • Manage schedules, budgets and resourcing for programs; escalate and unblock at leadership when necessary to meet non‑negotiable launch timelines.

What You'll Bring

  • Minimum 6+ years technical program management experience owning platform, cloud infrastructure, data, or validation programs that served multiple engineering teams; demonstrated ownership of large migrations, automation, or validation initiatives.
  • Prior experience working with cloud and on‑prem infrastructure, data pipelines (streaming and batch), CI/CD systems, and simulation or HIL validation environments. Direct experience in safety‑critical or regulated systems (aviation, medical devices, or similar) is a plus.
  • Track record of shipping measurable velocity and reliability improvements with concrete, tracked metrics (examples: % reduction in build/test time, SLO attainment, HIL throughput gains). Be prepared to share baseline→result examples in 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 on cloud, infra, data, or validation teams is strongly preferred.

Success in the first 6 months

  • Deliver one major program milestone: complete a phased migration or rollout that improves a tracked metric (e.g., 20–30% build/test reduction or 2x HIL throughput) and pass a launch readiness review.
  • Establish program dashboards and SLOs for platform health and developer velocity, and run the first three weekly program reviews with cross‑functional owners.
  • Close at least two high‑priority remediation items from prior postmortems with verified fixes and owner commitments.

What Else You Need To Know

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!

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