Head of Weather Systems

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