Hiring: Technical Program Manager, Flight Systems Platform Company: Zipline Location: South San Francisco, CA Job Posted Time: 2026-09-03 10:33:46 Target Skills & Keywords : CI/CD, Embedded Systems About the job Experience: •6+ years of technical program management experience owning platform programs (e.g., validation, infrastructure, data, embedded) that served multiple engineering teams; demonstrated ownership of large migrations, automation, or validation initiatives. Required Skills: •Be Zipline’s Technical Program Manager for Flight Systems Platform, partnering across Flight Software, Cloud Infrastructure, Data and ML, Autonomy, Maps, Validation, Application Software, and Operations. •Make dependencies, interfaces, sequencing, and tradeoffs across teams visible and actionable. Your work will improve engineering velocity, validation confidence, fleet availability, operational efficiency, and the safety and reliability of Zipline’s delivery network. •You do not need to be an expert in every platform domain. You should bring strong technical depth in one or more areas and the ability to learn quickly, connect systems-level concerns, and drive decisions across organizational boundaries. •Own cross-functional programs from strategy through delivery, defining outcomes, milestones, success metrics, dependencies, risks, and decision points. •Lead complex migrations, rollouts, and architectural transitions across cloud, on-premise, vehicle, dock, tower, and site environments. •Drive improvements in platform reliability, scalability, latency, cost, test throughput, developer feedback loops, deployment success, and operational recovery. •Establish shared readiness criteria for launches and migrations, including validation coverage, observability, rollback plans, operational ownership, and safety-critical dependencies. •Make cross-functional tradeoffs explicit, balancing safety, reliability, performance, cost, fidelity, delivery speed, and operational complexity. Qualifications: •Minimum of 6+ years of technical program management experience owning platform programs (e.g., validation, infrastructure, data, embedded) that served multiple engineering teams; demonstrated ownership of large migrations, automation, or validation initiatives. •Technical fluency in several of the following: cloud infrastructure, on-premise systems, CI/CD, distributed systems, embedded software, data platforms, ML infrastructure, simulation, hardware-in-the-loop testing, observability, or fleet operations. •Track record of shipping measurable velocity and reliability improvements with concrete metrics (e.g., % reduction in build/test time, SLO attainment, HIL throughput gains). Be prepared to share baseline-to-result examples during interviews. •Strong program control skills: risk registers, Gantt/timeline ownership, rollout/rollback plans, runbooks, and structured postmortems with tracked remediation items. •Demonstrated capacity 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 •Success in the first 3-6 months •Scope, plan, and kick off a complex, cross-functional program. •Deliver one major program milestone: complete a phased migration or rollout that improves a tracked metric (e.g., 10% cloud cost reduction) and pass a launch readiness review. Compensation: •$165,000 - $210,000 / year Interested candidates, please apply directly through the job posting on company's career page or try via AI auto apply on this platform. Don't miss this opportunity to join a forward-thinking team!