Jobs and Careers

Head of Weather Systems

South San Francisco, United Statesfull_timeVerifiedPosted 27 May 2026

💰 $255,000/yr($235,000/yr – $255,000/yr)

About the role

About Zipline

Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service. We are on a mission to serve all humans equally by ensuring access to food, medicine and essential goods anytime, anywhere. We design, build, and operate the world’s largest autonomous logistics system, delivering critical supplies quickly and reliably. Today, Zipline operates on four continents, makes a delivery somewhere in the world every 30 seconds, and has completed millions of deliveries to date, including blood, vaccines, medical supplies, food, and retail products.

Our customers include the world’s largest and most prominent healthcare systems, governments, retailers, restaurants and global businesses who rely on us to save lives, reduce emissions, increase economic opportunity, and provide delivery from point A to point B as fast as possible. The drone is only 15% of what we’ve built to enable seamless, reliable, global operations.

Our system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and gives people time back. With more than 140 million commercial autonomous miles safely flown, Zipline is redefining access to healthcare, consumer products, and food across the globe.

We operate at a global scale and are looking for practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth. Our team is motivated by building systems that have a direct, meaningful impact on people’s lives and by scaling the future of logistics. We are seeking people who sculpt from first principles, enjoy facing adversity, and can do the impossible at record breaking speeds.

What You'll Do

You will be at the center of informing Zipline on the critical environmental conditions that our aircraft must fly in to achieve business goals, whilst owning the automated system that enforces those limits operationally to ensure flight safety and protecting an excellent and informed customer experience. You will lead the team that counts the following among its core deliverables:

Design and develop our automated weather monitoring systems to make real-time go/no-go decisions for missions, as well as forecast in-coming weather conditions that would require pausing deliveries;
Define the requirements on flyable weather conditions to achieve business performance goals that are achievable in the context of automated risk system performance;
Set the pace on simulation- and real-world-based weather-related validation strategies, including performance of the weather system risk decisions, operations simulations to determine the role of the weather system on customer experience dynamics, and developing representative but tractable weather models in Zipline’s high fidelity flight simulation tools;
Enable and maintain strong and unambiguous communication with customer, fulfilment and flight operations teams, setting expectations for the system uptime, on both seasonal and daily timescales
Drive the development of ground- and air-based sensing to support the risk posture calculations in a scalable and cost-effective way

What You'll Bring

This is a leadership role on a team that is core to Zipline’s success, and is therefore not an entry level position. Success in this role will require a disciplined and first-principles approach, with a deep connection and understanding at the system and product levels. You’ll be naturally curious and able to work seamlessly with individuals and teams both inside and outside of your core engineering / scientific discipline, as well as regulatory, operations and business partners. Experience in many of the following areas are critical to your ability to contribute at the right level:

You will have a minimum of 5+ years of industry experience, and either be a proven people leader or clearly ready to own and develop a small team (3-5 direct reports).
Advanced proficiency with scientific python and libraries commonly used for data analysis, e.g., Pandas, Numpy, Scipy, and Matplotlib, XArray, NETCDF. In addition, you’ll be able to learn new languages and libraries for use in daily work (eg. Rust, C++), and ideally have cloud-native experience with Kubernetes and/or AWS.
Familiarity with geospatial and meteorological datasets, formats, and tools; in particular you’ll understand how to efficiently process large datasets across distributed systems and ideally have experience with kafka or other streaming data systems
As well as a strong understanding of descriptive statistics, probability and linear algebra, you will have mastered a wide range of machine learning and statistical techniques, and developed an intuition for what tool to apply in every situation
Adept at summarizing large datasets visually that make complex results understandable at a glance to different audiences. You will be able to find