Sr. Director Maintenance Operations
ZiplineAbout 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.
Sr. Director, MX Operations
About You & the Role
Zipline is looking for a Senior Director of MX Operations to build the maintenance operating system that lets Zipline scale one of the most complex real-world logistics networks in the world. We operate across aviation, robotics, software, hardware, fulfillment, launch, customer operations, and regulated flight operations. Maintenance is the layer that turns that system from impressive into reliable, repeatable, and economically scalable.
This role reports into Operations leadership and owns the execution muscle of Maintenance Operations across our US metros and future expansion sites. The work is hands-on, operationally intense, and highly cross-functional: you will lead regional maintenance leaders, hub maintenance teams, mobile maintenance, tooling and spares processes, work-order execution, return-to-service discipline, and the operating cadence that keeps aircraft, docks, droids, charging infrastructure, and future platforms available for commercial operations.
This is not a back-office maintenance role. Zipline is moving from proving the system works to scaling it metro by metro. That means the Senior Director of MX Operations must be able to run today with urgency while building the process, leadership bench, metrics, and culture that can support much higher volume, more sites, longer operating hours, and increasingly complex regulatory and technical requirements.
What You'll Do
You will own Maintenance Operations as a scaled operating function: aircraft, droid, dock, charger, zipping point, tooling, scheduled maintenance, unscheduled maintenance, mobile maintenance, hub-to-ops handoffs, and return-to-service execution.
You will build a maintenance system that is measured, fast, disciplined, and trusted. That includes clear ownership for every grounded asset, tight control of work orders, clean technician assignment, strong shift handoffs, useful dashboards, and a culture where overdue or unstarted work is surfaced quickly and driven to closure.
You will lead regional and hub maintenance leaders across active metros, starting with the current US operating footprint and expanding into new metros as Zipline grows. You will set the standard for technician authority, professional culture, safety, documentation, tool control, spares discipline, and execution quality.
You will partner tightly with Service Engineering, Flight Operations, Airworthiness, Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Product, Finance, Launch, and Field Operations. Your job is to make sure maintenance is never an ambiguous handoff point. When an asset is down, there should be one owner, one plan, one ETA, and one clear path to return to service.
You will create and run the maintenance operating cadence: daily fleet health review, hard-deck escalation, scheduled maintenance planning, unscheduled maintenance triage, parts and tooling readiness, staffing and shift coverage, and performance management across leaders and technicians.
You will improve the economics of maintenance. That means reducing avoidable downtime, increasing flights per maintenance grounding, improving work-order throughput, making scheduled maintenance predictable, using mobile maintenance intelligently, improving parts availability, an
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