Strategic Finance Manager, Operations

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

About The Position

We are looking for a Strategic Finance Manager, Operations to serve as a senior finance partner to Zipline’s operations focused on our next generation precise delivery platform. In this role, you will help Zipline understand and improve the financial performance of its operations across maintenance, flight operations, material planning, supply chain, demand planning, customer support, safety, flight test, real estate, ground systems, launch, and business operations. You will own core planning and reporting processes, including forecast versus actuals, annual forecasting and consolidation, operating performance reviews, and high priority ad hoc models that support leadership decisions. You will work directly with business partners to understand their goals, processes, constraints, and tradeoffs, then translate that operating context into clear financial insight. The right person will be expected to take ambiguous operational questions, structure the analysis, build the model, pressure test assumptions, align stakeholders, and help drive decisions.

Requirements

5–10 years of experience in strategic finance, corporate finance, operations finance, FP&A, investment banking, private equity, consulting, business operations, or another highly analytical role.
Deep financial modeling experience, including forecasting, scenario analysis, unit economics, P&L analysis, capex and opex planning, investment evaluation, and return-on-investment analysis.
Strong financial judgment and the ability to evaluate tradeoffs across growth, margin, capital allocation, operational scale, timing, and complexity.
Advanced Excel or Google Sheets skills, with the ability to build clean, dynamic, scalable models that others can understand and use.
Strong business-partnership skills, including the ability to work directly with operators, understand operational realities, and translate them into financial insight.
Experience owning forecasting, annual planning, consolidation, variance analysis, and recurring business-performance reviews.
Comfort working with large datasets and partnering with Data teams.
Strong communication skills, including the ability to explain financial tradeoffs to non-finance partners and operational realities to Finance leaders.
The ability to operate effectively in ambiguity, work with imperfect data, and create structure where processes are still being built.
High ownership, low ego, and strong curiosity. You are willing to ask basic questions, go deep on operational details, and move work forward across teams without formal authority.

Nice To Haves

Experience with SQL, Snowflake, dbt, Looker, Mode, Tableau, Hex, Python, or R is a plus.
Experience in hardware, logistics, aviation, robotics, manufacturing, supply chain, fleet operations, healthcare devices, physical infrastructure, or another operations-intensive business is strongly preferred, but not required.
You are energized by business problems where the answer is not obvious and the data is not perfectly packaged.
You can move fluidly between a detailed financial model, a conversation with an operator, anda recommendation to senior leadership.
You know how to build models that are rigorous enough to support major decisions but practical enough to be used by the business.
You are comfortable challenging assumptions while still building trust with business partners.
You want to understand how the operation actually works, not just how it appears in a spreadsheet.
You can distinguish between spending that accelerates scale and spending that adds complexity without enough return.

Responsibilities

Serve as a strategic finance partner to Global Operations leaders across teams such as Maintenance, Flight Operations, Material Planning, Supply Chain, Logistics, Customer Support, Safety, Flight Test, Business Operations, Real Estate, Ground Systems, and Launch.
Own forecast versus actuals for multiple teams within Operations, including variance analysis, KPI reporting, financial performance reviews, and clear communication of business drivers.
Lead annual planning and quarterly forecasting and consolidation processes, partnering with business leaders to translate operating plans, resource requirements, and strategic priorities into financial plans.
Build and maintain driver-based models for operating forecasts, long-range planning, unit economics, site performance, launch economics, utilization, labor, materials, support costs, and operational efficiency.
Develop high priority ad hoc analyses and decision models for leadership, including questions related to growth, margin, resource allocation, launch timing, operating model design, and cost optimization.
Partner with operators to understand the broader financial implications of their goals, processes, constraints, and proposed changes.
Analyze cost drivers across labor, maintenance, materials, fleet operations, ground systems, support, real estate, site preparation, launch costs, utilization, and delivery economics.
Identify opportunities to improve margin, reduce cost, increase utilization, improve forecast accuracy, and scale operations more efficiently.
Build repeatable reporting tools, dashboards, and planning workflows that improve visibility, reduce manual work, and increase accountability.
Partner with Accounting, Procurement, Supply Chain, Data, Product, Engineering, and Operations to improve planning processes, reporting accuracy, spend visibility, and decision making speed.
Translate complex analyses into clear recommendations for senior finance and operations leaders.
Proactively surface risks, decision points, and tradeoffs rather than waiting for perfect data or explicit direction.