Technical Program Manager Cloud Infra, Data, Validation Platforms

Zipline • South San Francisco, CA

23d • Hybrid

About The Position

Zipline is seeking a Technical Program Manager for Cloud, Data & Validation Platforms to join their Program Management team. This role will partner with Cloud Infrastructure, Data, Maps, Autonomy, Validation, and Operations teams to own the execution of platform capabilities essential for safe, repeatable launches and fleet scaling. These capabilities include cloud and on-prem infrastructure, data ingestion and analytics pipelines, CI/CD and developer productivity systems, simulation and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) validation environments, and telemetry/logging backplanes. The work directly impacts fleet availability, launch cadence, and safety validation, with delays or regressions affecting delivery reliability. The role is based in South San Francisco, requiring at least 4 days/week onsite presence, with occasional availability for evening or weekend launch windows and incident response.

Requirements

• Minimum 6+ years technical program management experience owning platform, cloud infrastructure, data, or validation programs that served multiple engineering teams; demonstrated ownership of large migrations, automation, or validation initiatives.
• Prior experience working with cloud and on-prem infrastructure, data pipelines (streaming and batch), CI/CD systems, and simulation or HIL validation environments.
• Track record of shipping measurable velocity and reliability improvements with concrete, tracked metrics (examples: % reduction in build/test time, SLO attainment, HIL throughput gains).
• Strong program control skills: risk registers, Gantt/timeline ownership, rollout/rollback plans, runbooks, and structured postmortems with tracked remediation items.
• Ability to make and defend hard tradeoffs on performance, cost, and safety; experienced at convening technical and ops stakeholders and driving binding decisions.
• Comfortable with operational intensity: on-call coordination for launches, occasional off-hours work for field tests/launches, and travel to test or customer sites (up to 10%).
• Location requirement: South San Francisco office presence minimum 4 days/week
• BS in CS, EE, Systems Engineering or equivalent experience; former software or systems engineer on cloud, infra, data, or validation teams is strongly preferred.

Nice To Haves

• Direct experience in safety-critical or regulated systems (aviation, medical devices, or similar) is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end programs with clear, measurable outcomes: define goals, milestones, success criteria and delivery schedules for platform initiatives spanning cloud/on-prem migrations, data pipeline reliability, CI/CD latency reductions, and HIL throughput improvements.
• Deliver against concrete targets (examples to own and drive): reduce full build+test cycle by 30% within 6 months for targeted teams; increase simulation/HIL test throughput by 2x in 9 months; raise pipeline data freshness to <5 minutes for critical telemetry; achieve 99.9% platform availability for developer environments during release windows.
• Prioritize and sequence work across infra, data, autonomy, validation, product, security and field ops; resolve cross-team tradeoffs (cost vs. latency vs. fidelity) and enforce rollout readiness gates tied to launch criteria.
• Lead migrations and rollouts: own migration plans, rollback strategies, runbooks, operator training, and phased rollout checklists for on-prem/cloud changes affecting validation or production fleets.
• Set and report program metrics: create dashboards, define SLIs/SLOs/SLAs, run weekly program reviews, and present progress, risks and mitigations to senior leadership.
• Drive operational readiness and incident follow-through: coordinate pre-launch readiness reviews, lead postmortems, and track remediation through closure with owners.
• Harden dev productivity and CI/CD: introduce build caching, parallelization, and infra automation to cut developer feedback loops; own vendor vs. build tradeoffs when selecting tooling.
• Manage schedules, budgets and resourcing for programs; escalate and unblock at leadership when necessary to meet non-negotiable launch timelines.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Associate degree