Program Manager

The Opportunity

Zipline has spent the last decade proving autonomous delivery can be safe, reliable, and life-changing at global scale. We are now focused on scaling that network into the world's first high growth, profitable autonomous delivery business.

The number of partners offering delivery through Zipline grew 13x in the first half of 2026. The next challenge is to make that growth compound: increasing customer demand and love, helping partners succeed, and demonstrating economics that improve with scale. That is the charter of Zipline’s Growth & Profitability program.

This program brings together marketplace strategy, network optimization, product, sales, and marketing to ensure that everything connects with hardware engineering, flight software, and operations. We need a deeply experienced program leader to integrate the seams so it all adds up to efficient business results.

In this role you will partner directly with the executive accountable for commercial cross-organizational program decisions, the Directly Responsible Individual (DRI).

What you’ll do

• Set the program outcomes and tradeoffs. With the DRI, define a small set of measures linking growth, customer and partner adoption, capacity, service quality, utilization, unit economics, and margin.
• Own cross-program integration. Translate priorities in both directions; and expose dependencies, resource conflicts, ownership gaps, and organizational barriers.
• Serve as the DRI’s field deputy. Make day-to-day cross-functional calls within the delegated mandate, drive decisions to closure, and bring the DRI well-framed choices when their judgment or authority is required.
• Lead at the seams. Drive outcomes no function can deliver alone and help define steady-state ownership and handoff timeliness
• Create the program’s source of truth and communication system. Keep metrics, milestones, decisions, risks, and cross-team asks current; use concise updates and operating reviews to surface issues while the company still has good choices.
• Stay close to operating reality. Spend time with metro teams, operators, partners, and customers; test headquarters assumptions against field evidence and adapt the plan quickly.

What Great Looks Like

• Customer experience, community love, customer growth, repeat usage, partner outcomes, capacity utilization, and unit economics improve together.
• Metro launches, partner activations, and operational changes move faster and shift from one-off heroics to a repeatable operating model.
• You ensure decisions close faster because leaders share a current view of priorities, ownership, tradeoffs, dependencies, and risk; avoidable surprises are rare.
• The DRI focuses on decisions that need their authority, while functional leaders feel accelerated by you—not displaced or burdened by process.

What You’ll Bring

• 12+ years in progressively senior operating, program, GM, product, strategy-and-operations, transformation, or executive-office roles, with a record of personally leading consequential cross-company work to measurable commercial or operating results.
• Credibility with executives and functional leaders: you can influence difficult decisions without reporting-line authority and handle sensitive business and organizational context with judgment.
• Strong P&L judgment across growth, customer behavior, partner economics, pricing, capacity, utilization, and unit economics.
• The range to move from long-term strategy to quantitative detail and frontline execution, and the communication skill to turn fragmented context into crisp decisions, plans, and updates.
• Experience building lightweight operating mechanisms that create ownership, speed, and follow-through without bureaucracy.
• High agency and low ego: you have sufficient fluency across various domains, will challenge assumptions with first-principles reasoning, change your mind when the evidence is better, and stay accountable through the outcome.
• Experience in one of multi-sided marketplaces, logistics, delivery, mobility, aviation, infrastructure, or other hardware-enabled, regulated, or operations-intensive networks.

What Else You Need to know

This is an in-person role based at Zipline’s South San Francisco headquarters. It requires regular travel to operating metros and partner locations to stay close to customers, teams, launches, and operating reality.

The starting cash range for this role is $200,000-$300,000. 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!