Technical Release Manager

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.

Zipline's System Validation team ensures the software and hardware powering our autonomous delivery system operate safely, reliably, and as intended in the real world.

• Own the end-to-end release process across a portfolio of software and system releases, aligning scope, content, configuration, schedule, validation, risks, and readiness from planning through sign-off and deployment.
• Be the expert on release content and configuration, including release-defining changes, hardware and software compatibility, cross-system dependencies, and the downstream impact of changes.
• Coordinate release activities across component teams and downstream consumers, aligning dependencies and incremental work with release milestones to improve consistency and predictability.
• Assess release readiness, anticipate risk, and work across teams to develop mitigation strategies. Ensure validation evidence, release blockers, exceptions, dependencies, and required decisions are understood and resolved before each release gate.
• Lead cross-functional release forums, driving clear decisions, ownership, and accountability.
• Proactively identify and own technical projects that resolve major inefficiencies and/or gaps in the release process.
• Improve release metrics, dashboards, and supporting tools, providing engineering, operations, and leadership with accurate, data-backed assessments of release health.

• A bachelor's or master's degree in systems engineering, computer science, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 3+ years of experience as a Technical Program Manager, Release Manager, Systems Engineer, or in a related role.
• Experience in aerospace, autonomous vehicles, robotics, or other safety-critical, hardware-software systems.
• Working knowledge of software configuration, change, and release management, including version control, branch strategy, traceability, and compatibility management.
• Familiarity with the systems engineering concepts, including verification and validation, safety and risk assessment, requirement to test traceability.
• Technical fluency across complex hardware-software…