Engineering Manager, Weather Risk Systems

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. What You'll Do You will own one of the systems that determines whether Zipline can safely and reliably fly: the automated weather intelligence and risk system that makes real-time operational go/no-go decisions for missions. This is not a reporting or advisory role. You will be accountable for turning messy, uncertain atmospheric data into clear operational limits, scalable automation, and business-critical decisions that protect safety, reliability, and customer trust. You will lead the team responsible for: Building and improving automated weather monitoring systems that make real-time mission go/no-go decisions and forecast conditions that require pausing deliveries. Defining the flyable weather envelope Zipline needs to hit business goals without compromising safety or automated risk-system integrity. Driving validation strategy across simulation, historical data, real-world operations, and high-fidelity flight simulation. Quantifying how weather-system decisions affect uptime, customer experience, fulfillment reliability, and operational throughput. Developing representative, tractable weather models that can be used in Zipline’s flight simulation and operational planning tools. Setting clear expectations with customer, fulfillment, and flight operations teams on system uptime, seasonal risk, daily operating constraints, and weather-driven delivery interruptions. Driving the development of ground- and air-based sensing systems that improve Zipline’s operational risk posture at global scale. Making hard prioritization calls across safety, uptime, model performance, sensing cost, operational complexity, and speed of deployment. What You'll Bring This is a senior leadership role on a team central to Zipline’s ability to scale. It is not an entry-level role, and it is not a role for someone who wants clean problems, narrow ownership, or slow-moving systems. You should be a disciplined, first-principles thinker who can connect physics, statistics, software, operations, and product judgment into systems that work in the real world. You should be comfortable owning ambiguity, making decisions with incomplete information, and being held accountable for the operational consequences of those decisions. You will need many of the following: 5+ years of industry experience, with proven people leadership or clear readiness to lead and develop a small high-performing team of 3-5