Head of Weather Intelligence

What You'll Do

You will own one of the systems that determines whether Zipline can safely and reliably fly: the automated weather intelligence and risk system that makes real-time operational go/no-go decisions for missions.

This is not a reporting or advisory role. You will be accountable for turning messy, uncertain atmospheric data into clear operational limits, scalable automation, and business-critical decisions that protect safety, reliability, and customer trust.

You will lead the team responsible for:

• Building and improving automated weather monitoring systems that make real-time mission go/no-go decisions and forecast conditions that require pausing deliveries.
• Defining the flyable weather envelope Zipline needs to hit business goals without compromising safety or automated risk-system integrity.
• Driving validation strategy across simulation, historical data, real-world operations, and high-fidelity flight simulation.
• Quantifying how weather-system decisions affect uptime, customer experience, fulfillment reliability, and operational throughput.
• Developing representative, tractable weather models that can be used in Zipline’s flight simulation and operational planning tools.
• Setting clear expectations with customer, fulfillment, and flight operations teams on system uptime, seasonal risk, daily operating constraints, and weather-driven delivery interruptions.
• Driving the development of ground- and air-based sensing systems that improve Zipline’s operational risk posture at global scale.
• Making hard prioritization calls across safety, uptime, model performance, sensing cost, operational complexity, and speed of deployment.

What You'll Bring

This is a senior leadership role on a team central to Zipline’s ability to scale. It is not an entry-level role, and it is not a role for someone who wants clean problems, narrow ownership, or slow-moving systems.

You should be a disciplined, first-principles thinker who can connect physics, statistics, software, operations, and product judgment into systems that work in the real world. You should be comfortable owning ambiguity, making decisions with incomplete information, and being held accountable for the operational consequences of those decisions.

You will need many of the following:

• 5+ years of industry experience, with proven people leadership or clear readiness to lead and develop a small high-performing team of 3-5 direct reports.
• Deep fluency in scientific Python and common data-analysis tools, including Pandas, NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, Xarray, and NetCDF.
• Ability to learn and work in production languages and systems such as Rust, C++, Kubernetes, and AWS.
• Experience with geospatial and meteorological datasets, formats, and tooling.
• Strong ability to process large datasets efficiently across distributed systems; experience with Kafka or other streaming systems is highly valuable.
• Strong foundations in descriptive statistics, probability, linear algebra, machine learning, and statistical modeling.
• Judgment about which analytical or modeling tool to use, when not to overcomplicate the solution, and how to validate whether the answer is operationally useful.
• Ability to make large, uncertain datasets visually clear and decision-ready for technical, operational, and executive audiences.
• Excellent understanding of meteorology and climatology, including the ability to explain the underlying physics, uncertainty, and operational implications to non-experts.
• High self-direction, strong prioritization, and the ability to drive a roadmap while responding to urgent needs in a fast-scaling operational system.
• A track record of raising the pace and quality of a small technical team through better tools, clearer priorities, and stronger execution habits.
• Experience with aircraft flight, aviation weather, or aviation regulation is valuable. If you do not have it, you must be able to learn it quickly and work effectively with Zipline’s flight sciences leaders.

Bonus: an ability to manipulate the weather would be useful, but not required.

What Else You Need to Know

This role is based at Zipline’s South San Francisco HQ and requires a minimum of 5 days per week in office. You must be eligible to work in the US and able to travel globally as needed.

The starting cash range for this role is $185,000 to $255,000. Final compensation will depend on experience, qualifications, skills, location, and expected impact. Total compensation may also include equity, discretionary annual or performance bonuses, sales incentives, benefits, 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, disability, medical condition, genetic information, sex, pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, military or veteran status, citizenship, or any other protected characteristic.

We value diversity at Zipline and welcome applications from people traditionally underrepresented in tech. If this role sounds exciting but you are not sure whether you meet every qualification, we encourage you to apply.