Head of Weather Systems

About You and The Role

You will lead Zipline’s Weather Intelligence team, that defines and enforces the environmental limits under which our aircraft operate safely and reliably. This owner-level role sits at the intersection of meteorology, software, flight operations, and safety. Your work makes automated go/no-go decisions for thousands of missions every day, directly affecting uptime, delivery throughput, customer experience, and regulatory safety posture. You will operate inside a high-velocity global logistics and aviation environment where decisions must be defensible to operators, regulators, and partners, and where system failures have operational and safety consequences.

What You'll Do

• Own end-to-end development and operational performance of the automated weather intelligence and risk system used for mission go/no-go decisions across Zipline’s operational regions. You are the single technical and product owner for system behavior and reliability.
• Translate meteorological uncertainty into concrete, testable operational limits and encode those into automated decision logic used in daily operations.
• Define and measure success: set quantitative targets (e.g., uptime improvement, false downtime rate, missed-risk rate, delivery throughput impact) and deliver within the first 12 months measurable improvements compared with our first year of commercial operations.
• Lead validation efforts using a combination of simulation, historical log replay, flight test, and live operations; design experiments and acceptance criteria for new models, sensors, and rules before production rollout.
• Prioritize trade-offs across safety margin, operational availability, sensing cost, model complexity, and deployment speed; document failure modes and rollback criteria for all changes.
• Own cross-functional execution with Flight Operations, Safety, Flight Sciences, Simulation, Field Sites, and Engineering: define SLAs, incident roles, and escalation paths for weather-driven incidents.
• Drive the roadmap for sensing (ground and air), data ingestion, model tooling, and runtime decision services; sponsor necessary infrastructure (streaming, simulation, monitoring) to help meet operational SLAs.
• Hire, mentor, and manage a small technical team (3–5 engineers/scientists) or partner with an existing engineering manager while retaining product and technical ownership of the weather system.
• Operate an on-call / incident rotation for weather-system outages; run post-incident reviews, own corrective action plans, and feedback into validation and deployment processes.

What You'll Bring

• Minimum 6+ years industry experience shipping mission-critical decision systems; demonstrable ownership of automated operational decision logic in production at scale.
• Required technical skills: deep fluency in scientific Python (Pandas, NumPy, Xarray, NetCDF), experience with time-series/streaming systems (Kafka or equivalent), and comfort reading/working with production stacks (Kubernetes, AWS, Rust/C++ codebases). Ability to prototype and ship models into production pipelines.
• Domain expertise: strong working knowledge of meteorology, aviation weather, or related geospatial environmental science; ability to explain physics, uncertainty, and operational implications to non-experts and regulators.
• Systems judgment: experience defining quantitative metrics (false-positive/negative tradeoffs), designing validation experiments (simulation + field tests), and documenting failure modes and rollback criteria.
• Operations intensity: history working with 24/7 operational systems, incident response, and SLAs; comfortable making and owning high-consequence trade-offs under uncertainty.
• Leadership: experience leading or directly influencing small cross-disciplinary teams and driving measurable improvements in uptime, throughput, or reliability within 6–12 months.
• Logistics & constraints: must be able to work onsite in South San Francisco full-time and travel internationally
• Must-have traits: decisive under uncertainty, rigorous about validation and failure modes, able to translate scientific complexity into deterministic operational rules and measurable outcomes.

What Else You Need To Know

The starting cash range for this role is $185,000 to $255,000. Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws or our own sensibilities.

We value diversity at Zipline and welcome applications from those who are traditionally underrepresented in tech. If you like the sound of this position but are not sure if you are the perfect fit, please apply!