Head of Weather Systems

The role

You will lead the Weather Intelligence team to define and enforce environmental limits for aircraft operations. You will own the development and operational performance of automated weather intelligence and risk systems used for mission decisions.

What you will do

• Own end-to-end development and operational performance of the automated weather intelligence and risk system.
• Translate meteorological uncertainty into concrete, testable operational limits.
• Define and measure success through quantitative targets.
• Lead validation efforts using simulation, historical log replay, flight test, and live operations.
• Prioritize trade-offs across safety margin, operational availability, sensing cost, model complexity, and deployment speed.
• Own cross-functional execution with Flight Operations, Safety, Flight Sciences, Simulation, Field Sites, and Engineering.
• Drive the roadmap for sensing, data ingestion, model tooling, and runtime decision services.
• Hire, mentor, and manage a small technical team of 3–5 engineers/scientists.
• Operate an on-call / incident rotation for weather-system outages.

Required qualifications

• Minimum 6+ years industry experience shipping mission-critical decision systems.
• Demonstrable ownership of automated operational decision logic in production at scale.
• Deep fluency in scientific Python (Pandas, NumPy, Xarray, NetCDF).
• Experience with time-series/streaming systems (Kafka or equivalent).
• Comfort reading/working with production stacks (Kubernetes, AWS, Rust/C++ codebases).
• Ability to prototype and ship models into production pipelines.
• 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.
• Experience defining quantitative metrics.
• Experience designing validation experiments.
• Experience documenting failure modes and rollback criteria.
• History working with 24/7 operational systems, incident response, and SLAs.

About the company

Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service. They operate an autonomous logistics system to deliver food, medicine, and essential goods globally.