Product Manager Airspace & Autonomy - DoorDash Air

DoorDash•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

DoorDash Air is building drone delivery capabilities, while DoorDash Labs develops automation and robotics solutions for last-mile logistics. The Product Manager for Airspace & Autonomy owns the end-to-end product strategy for the software, services, autonomy, perception, human interfaces, and related capabilities needed to deploy autonomous drone delivery at scale. The role connects DoorDash’s order and logistics platform with aircraft, autonomy systems, mission-planning services, UTM capabilities, fleet-management tools, and operator workflows. The role defines how orders move from merchant readiness through dispatch, airspace validation, autonomous flight, delivery, and completion. It sets product vision, platform architecture, capability roadmaps, investment priorities, system boundaries, and build-versus-partner decisions across aircraft, onboard software, cloud services, operational tooling, and DoorDash integrations. The Product Manager works across autonomy, aviation software, services, hardware, systems engineering, flight operations, UTM, safety, regulatory, data, and DoorDash platform teams, partnering closely with the Head of UTM and senior Engineering and Operations leaders. The role also coaches and mentors engineers and maintains credibility and leadership in standards-development organizations to support regulatory compliance in the U.S. and abroad. The position encompasses autonomy and multi-aircraft operations, airspace and UTM management, aviation data strategy, standards and regulatory compliance, system-level metrics, business cases, and the organizational capabilities needed to scale safe, reliable, and economically viable drone delivery.

Requirements

10+ years of product management, technical product leadership, systems leadership, or related experience, including significant responsibility for complex software or cyber-physical platforms.
5+ years of experience in autonomous systems, robotics, UAS, aviation technology, safety-critical systems, or another highly regulated real-world operating environment.
Demonstrated experience taking technically complex products from early concept or prototype through validation, deployment, and operational scale.
Experience owning products spanning multiple technology-stack layers, including embedded or vehicle software, cloud services, APIs, data infrastructure, operational applications, and hardware integration.
Strong technical fluency in autonomous-system concepts such as mission planning, path planning, motion planning, perception, localization, guidance and control, behavior management, contingency handling, simulation, telemetry, and command and control.
Experience defining product strategy and architecture for distributed, real-time, or mission-critical systems where reliability, safety, and operational performance are fundamental requirements.
Working knowledge of UTM, airspace-management systems, geospatial data, flight-planning services, operational volumes, conformance monitoring, and airspace interoperability.
Experience working within or building technology for FAA-regulated environments, including familiarity with some combination of National Airspace System hardware, software, and procedures; Part 107, Part 135, Part 108, or Part 146; BVLOS operating approvals; UTM or USS services; and evolving autonomous-flight regulations.
Experience designing or scaling human-supervised autonomy, remote operations, multi-vehicle systems, fleet orchestration, or m:N operating models.

Responsibilities

Own the end-to-end product strategy for DoorDash Air’s safety-critical software, services, and platform infrastructure.
Define the long-term vision, platform architecture, capability roadmap, and investment priorities across aircraft, onboard software, cloud services, operational tooling, and DoorDash platform integrations.
Integrate drone delivery into the DoorDash marketplace by defining how merchant preparation, order readiness, dispatch timing, routing, customer promises, delivery-zone eligibility, and fulfillment decisions interact with aircraft availability, weather, airspace, and operational constraints.
Lead the autonomy product roadmap, setting priorities for mission planning, autonomous path and motion planning, contingency behaviors, rerouting, detect-and-avoid integration, vehicle health, payload handling, landing and delivery behaviors, and remote assistance.
Define the roadmap for moving from one operator supervising one aircraft toward increasingly autonomous multi-aircraft operations, including exception management, alert prioritization, task allocation, fleet orchestration, remote intervention, and human-autonomy interface design.
Define the data strategy for autonomous aviation, including decisions about geospatial, terrain, obstacle, weather, airspace, population-risk, connectivity, landing-zone, and operational data.
Build UTM and airspace-management capabilities, including operational-volume generation, strategic and tactical deconfliction, dynamic rerouting, airspace authorization, constraint management, conformance monitoring, and interoperability.
Lead standards compliance and engagement, championing relevant ASTM standards and maintaining an active leadership role in ASTM standards-development activities on DoorDash’s behalf.
Translate Part 135 requirements, BVLOS approvals, safety cases, operational limitations, and emerging Part 108 concepts into reusable software, data, workflows, auditability, and configuration-management capabilities.
Make build, buy, and partner decisions for technology providers, data sources, autonomy components, and infrastructure partners based on differentiation, integration complexity, operational risk, economics, and time to market.
Establish system-level success metrics and instrumentation across delivery success, order-to-dispatch time, route efficiency, intervention frequency, operator-to-aircraft ratio, aircraft utilization, mission completion, system availability, regulatory conformance, and cost per delivery.
Develop business cases and sequencing recommendations that balance safety, customer experience, operational scalability, engineering effort, deployment speed, and long-term unit economics.
Identify the product, systems, autonomy, platform, data, hardware, test, and operational capabilities needed to achieve the roadmap; partner with functional leaders to define roles, address talent gaps, and build a scalable organization.
Coach and mentor engineers, helping them understand how their work contributes to the broader vision and safe, scalable drone delivery operations.
Set priorities, make technical and product tradeoffs, and hold cross-functional teams accountable for delivering an integrated drone delivery system.