Head of Weather Systems

Company: Zipline
Location: South San Francisco
Posted on: April 1, 2026

Job Description:

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 creative ways to take the uncertainty of weather prediction and turn it into certainty for the business. Excellent understanding of meteorology and climatology, and an ability to communicate the underlying physics and their challenges to a broad audience You’ll be highly self-directed; able to drive a roadmap and ruthlessly prioritize, balancing a core roadmap against the emerging needs of a fast-scaling and complex system. You’ll also be proven in setting the pace of a small team, striving to continuously improve the development tools and processes and help folks around you work smarter Experience with aircraft flight and aviation weather and regulation would be helpful, although you will work closely with other leaders of our flight sciences teams so a willingness to learn this rapidly will suffice. An ability to manipulate the weather would be advantageous, but is not essential. What Else You Need to Know This role is based out of our South San Francisco HQ with minimum of 5 days per week in office. Must be eligible to work in the US and travel globally as needed The starting cash range for this role is $235,000 to $255,000. Please note that this is a target, starting cash range for a candidate who meets the minimum qualifications for this role. The final cash pay for this role will depend on a variety of factors, including a specific candidate's experience, qualifications, skills, working location, and projected impact. The total compensation package for this role may also include: equity compensation; discretionary annual or performance bonuses; sales incentives; benefits such as medical, dental and vision insurance; paid time off; and more. Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, mental or physical disability, medical condition, genetic information, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, military or veteran status, citizenship, or other characteristics protected by state, federal or local law or our other policies. 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!

Keywords: Zipline, Dublin , Head of Weather Systems, Science, Research & Development , South San Francisco, California