Program Manager - Growth & Profitability

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

2d•$200,000 - $300,000•Onsite

About The Position

Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service, focused on serving all humans equally by ensuring access to food, medicine, and essential goods anytime, anywhere. They design, build, and operate the world’s largest autonomous logistics system, making millions of deliveries globally. Zipline operates on four continents and makes a delivery every 30 seconds. Their system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and saves people time. With over 140 million commercial autonomous miles safely flown, Zipline is redefining access to healthcare, consumer products, and food worldwide. The company is seeking practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth, motivated by building systems with a direct, meaningful impact and scaling the future of logistics. They value individuals who sculpt from first principles, enjoy facing adversity, and can achieve the impossible at record speeds. Zipline has proven autonomous delivery can be safe, reliable, and life-changing at a global scale. The current focus is on scaling this network into the world's first high-growth, profitable autonomous delivery business. The number of partners offering delivery through Zipline grew 13x in the first half of 2026. The next challenge is to make this growth compound by increasing customer demand and satisfaction, helping partners succeed, and demonstrating economics that improve with scale. This is the charter of Zipline’s Growth & Profitability program, which integrates marketplace strategy, network optimization, product, and sales & marketing with hardware & flight software engineering and operations. A deeply experienced program leader is needed to integrate these functions to achieve efficient business results. This role will partner directly with the executive accountable for cross-organizational program decisions, the Directly Responsible Individual (DRI).

Requirements

12+ years in progressively senior operating, program, GM, product, strategy-and-operations, transformation, or executive-office roles, with a record of personally leading consequential cross-company work to measurable commercial or operating results.
Credibility with executives and functional leaders: you can influence difficult decisions without reporting-line authority and handle sensitive business and organizational context with judgment.
Strong P&L judgment across growth, customer behavior, partner economics, pricing, capacity, utilization, and unit economics.
The range to move from long-term strategy to quantitative detail and frontline execution, and the communication skill to turn fragmented context into crisp decisions, plans, and updates.
Experience building lightweight operating mechanisms that create ownership, speed, and follow-through without bureaucracy.
High agency and low ego: you have sufficient fluency across various domains, will challenge assumptions with first-principles reasoning, change your mind when the evidence is better, and stay accountable through the outcome.
Experience in one of multi-sided marketplaces, logistics, delivery, mobility, aviation, infrastructure, or other hardware-enabled, regulated, or operations-intensive networks.

Nice To Haves

Customer experience, community love, customer growth, repeat usage, partner outcomes, capacity utilization, and unit economics improve together.
Metro launches, partner activations, and operational changes move faster and shift from one-off heroics to a repeatable operating model.
You ensure decisions close faster because leaders share a current view of priorities, ownership, tradeoffs, dependencies, and risk; avoidable surprises are rare.
The DRI focuses on decisions that need their authority, while functional leaders feel accelerated by you—not displaced or burdened by process.

Responsibilities

Set the program outcomes and tradeoffs. With the DRI, define a small set of measures linking growth, customer and partner adoption, capacity, service quality, utilization, unit economics, and margin.
Own cross-program integration. Translate priorities in both directions; and expose dependencies, resource conflicts, ownership gaps, and organizational barriers.
Serve as the DRI’s field deputy. Make day-to-day cross-functional calls within the delegated mandate, drive decisions to closure, and bring the DRI well-framed choices when their judgment or authority is required.
Lead at the seams. Drive outcomes no function can deliver alone and help define steady-state ownership and handoff timeliness.
Create the program’s source of truth and communication system. Keep metrics, milestones, decisions, risks, and cross-team asks current; use concise updates and operating reviews to surface issues while the company still has good choices.
Stay close to operating reality. Spend time with metro teams, operators, partners, and customers; test headquarters assumptions against field evidence and adapt the plan quickly.