Software Engineering Manager, Launch & Scale Platform

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.

About You & the Role

You are the Software Engineering Manager for Zipline’s Launch & Scale Platform: the leader who builds the software systems that enable Zipline to rapidly deploy new infrastructure around the world. This team owns the operational platform that turns a new market from an idea into a live, revenue-generating network—covering site acquisition, infrastructure design, permitting, construction execution, deployment tracking, and launch readiness. Your work directly affects Zipline’s ability to expand into new countries and deliver time-critical supplies reliably at scale.

This is a greenfield product and engineering leadership role. You will establish the product roadmap, technical vision, and engineering foundations for a platform intended to scale Zipline from tens of sites to hundreds or thousands. You will partner closely with Real Estate, Launch Operations, Construction, Hardware, Flight Operations, Commercial, and Manufacturing to replace fragmented manual workflows with a single, auditable, automated operational system that raises launch velocity, predictability, and safety.

What You’ll Do

• Own end-to-end strategy, delivery, and operational reliability for the Launch & Scale Platform (site acquisition pipeline, permitting, infrastructure design, construction execution, deployment tracking, and launch readiness).
• Define and prioritize the product and technical roadmap with stakeholders, driving decisions by measurable business impact (launch velocity, mean time-to-launch, deployment predictability, and reduction in manual coordination).
• Deliver owner-level outcomes: reduce manual coordination across launch workflows by a measurable percent, improve predictability of launch dates, shorten average site launch timelines, and increase launch execution visibility for cross-functional leaders.
• Translate complex, cross-functional operational processes into durable systems: long-running workflows, vendor and government interfaces, asset tracking, document and permit lifecycle, and risk/exceptions handling.
• Design and operate production services for business-critical launch systems: set SLOs, incident processes, and on-call expectations; ensure operational data is accurate, auditable, and actionable.