Head of Weather Intelligence

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

11h•$185,000 - $255,000•Onsite

About The Position

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.

Requirements

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.
Disciplined, first-principles thinker who can connect physics, statistics, software, operations, and product judgment into systems that work in the real world.
Comfortable owning ambiguity, making decisions with incomplete information, and being held accountable for the operational consequences of those decisions.
5+ years of industry experience, with proven people leadership or clear readiness to lead and develop a small high-performing team of 3-5 direct reports.
Deep fluency in scientific Python and common data-analysis tools, including Pandas, NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, Xarray, and NetCDF.
Ability to learn and work in production languages and systems such as Rust, C++, Kubernetes, and AWS.
Experience with geospatial and meteorological datasets, formats, and tooling.
Strong ability to process large datasets efficiently across distributed systems; experience with Kafka or other streaming systems is highly valuable.
Strong foundations in descriptive statistics, probability, linear algebra, machine learning, and statistical modeling.
Judgment about which analytical or modeling tool to use, when not to overcomplicate the solution, and how to validate whether the answer is operationally useful.
Ability to make large, uncertain datasets visually clear and decision-ready for technical, operational, and executive audiences.
Excellent understanding of meteorology and climatology, including the ability to explain the underlying physics, uncertainty, and operational implications to non-experts.
High self-direction, strong prioritization, and the ability to drive a roadmap while responding to urgent needs in a fast-scaling operational system.
A track record of raising the pace and quality of a small technical team through better tools, clearer priorities, and stronger execution habits.

Nice To Haves

Experience with aircraft flight, aviation weather, or aviation regulation is valuable. If you do not have it, you must be able to learn it quickly and work effectively with Zipline’s flight sciences leaders.
An ability to manipulate the weather would be useful, but not required.

Responsibilities

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.
Accountable for turning messy, uncertain atmospheric data into clear operational limits, scalable automation, and business-critical decisions that protect safety, reliability, and customer trust.
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.
Define the flyable weather envelope Zipline needs to hit business goals without compromising safety or automated risk-system integrity.
Drive validation strategy across simulation, historical data, real-world operations, and high-fidelity flight simulation.
Quantify how weather-system decisions affect uptime, customer experience, fulfillment reliability, and operational throughput.
Develop representative, tractable weather models that can be used in Zipline’s flight simulation and operational planning tools.
Set clear expectations with customer, fulfillment, and flight operations teams on system uptime, seasonal risk, daily operating constraints, and weather-driven delivery interruptions.
Drive the development of ground- and air-based sensing systems that improve Zipline’s operational risk posture at global scale.
Make hard prioritization calls across safety, uptime, model performance, sensing cost, operational complexity, and speed of deployment.