Test Maintenance Program Manager

Zipline • South San Francisco, CA

3d • Onsite

About The Position

Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service, aiming to serve 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, delivering critical supplies quickly and reliably. Zipline operates on four continents, makes a delivery every 30 seconds, and has completed millions of deliveries. Their system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and gives people time back, with over 140 million commercial autonomous miles safely flown. 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 on people’s lives and scaling the future of logistics. They are looking for individuals who sculpt from first principles, enjoy facing adversity, and can achieve the impossible at record-breaking speeds.

In this role as the Test Maintenance Program Manager, you will own end-to-end program delivery to ensure test aircraft and test sites are mission-ready across Zipline’s test operations footprint. This position is crucial as maintenance readiness directly impacts flight-test cadence, safety margins, and the speed at which new hardware is validated and commercial operations are scaled. You will transform day-to-day maintenance demands into owned programs that eliminate blockers, enhance configuration control, and translate test-site learnings into repeatable processes and tooling to improve fleet availability and reduce safety/regulatory risk.

Requirements

• 5+ years in program management, maintenance operations, test operations, engineering operations, or a closely related technical operations role; demonstrated ownership of complex, multi-site programs.
• Direct experience with aircraft maintenance, aviation test operations, aerospace hardware test, fleet operations, or high-tempo field maintenance environments preferred and will be assessed as a hard discriminator.
• Proven ability to own outcomes (not just coordination): set deadlines, force tradeoffs, escalate, and close actions with measurable impact on readiness and cadence.
• Hands-on experience with configuration management, change control processes, inspections/audit readiness, and hardware modification tracking.
• Track record building dashboards and operational metrics (examples: % campaign-ready, MTTR for return-to-service, blocker backlog age) and using them to drive prioritization.
• Comfortable operating under time pressure with tangible consequences to delays (flight-test schedule slips, safety/regulatory exposure, lost validation opportunities).
• Strong communicator who can run cross-functional meetings, write concise program updates, and present readiness tradeoffs to engineering and test leadership.
• Proficient with tools such as Jira, Confluence, spreadsheets, dashboarding tools, and distributed communication platforms.
• Role requires regular onsite presence at Zipline test sites and coordination across multiple locations; ability to travel between test sites (frequency will vary by program cadence) and be flexible around test-campaign schedules is required.
• Must be able to work schedules aligned with flight-test windows, including occasional early mornings, late evenings, or weekend campaign support as needed.

Responsibilities

• Own program-level delivery for test maintenance across NestZ, Nest0, Truckzilla, Cascades, and new test sites: set milestones, assign owners, enforce deadlines, and be accountable for program outcomes.
• Translate floor-level maintenance needs into program plans: capture tooling, parts, documentation, technician training, inspections, configuration baselines, and return-to-service assumptions.
• Act as the primary programmatic link between Maintenance Ops Engineering, Flight Test, Engineering, Product, and site operations—drive cross-functional decisions and escalate unresolved risks to stakeholders.
• Maintain and own configuration and modification tracking for all active test aircraft: ensure change-control compliance, run configuration audits, and close corrective actions.
• Track and report measurable readiness metrics and SLAs (e.g., percent of aircraft meeting campaign-ready criteria, mean time to return-to-service, blocker closure rate) on a cadence tied to campaign schedules.
• Run regular Test Maintenance Program Updates for leadership and site teams that surface blockers, decisions needed, impacts to flight-test velocity, and resource gaps.
• Design and deploy dashboards, checklists, and workflows that reduce technician administrative burden and speed maintenance execution.
• Convert test-site lessons into standard work, tooling requirements, documentation updates, validated training inputs, and go/no-go criteria for commercial handoff.
• Lead or coordinate maintenance validation campaigns and own program decisions about scale versus rework based on readiness outcomes and risk tolerances.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed