Head of Weather Systems

About Zipline

Do you want to change the world? Zipline is on a mission to transform the way goods move. Our aim is to solve the world’s most urgent and complex access challenges by building, manufacturing and operating the first instant delivery and logistics system that serves all humans equally, wherever they are. From powering Rwanda’s national blood delivery network and Ghana’s COVID-19 vaccine distribution, to providing on-demand home delivery for Walmart, to enabling healthcare providers to bring care directly to U.S. homes, we are transforming the way things move for businesses, governments and consumers.

The technology is complex but the idea is simple: a teleportation service that delivers what you need, when you need it. Through our technology that includes robotics and autonomy, we are decarbonizing delivery, decreasing road congestion, and reducing fossil fuel consumption and air pollution, while providing equitable access to billions of people and building a more resilient global supply chain.

Join Zipline and help us to make good on our promise to build an equitable and more resilient global supply chain for billions of people.

You will be at the center of informing Zipline on the critical environmental conditions that our aircraft must fly in to achieve business goals, whilst owning the automated system that enforces those limits operationally to ensure flight safety and protecting an excellent and informed customer experience. You will lead the team that counts the following among its core deliverables:

• Design and develop our automated weather monitoring systems to make real‑time go/no‑go decisions for missions, as well as forecast in‑coming weather conditions that would require pausing deliveries;
• Define the requirements on flyable weather conditions to achieve business performance goals that are achievable in the context of automated risk system performance;
• Set the pace on simulation‑ and real‑world‑based weather‑related validation strategies, including performance of the weather system risk decisions, operations simulations to determine the role of the weather system on customer experience dynamics, and developing representative but tractable weather models in Zipline’s high fidelity flight simulation tools;
• Enable and maintain strong and unambiguous communication with customer, fulfilment and flight operations teams, setting expectations for the system uptime, on both seasonal and daily timescales
• Drive the development of ground‑ and air‑based sensing to support the risk posture calculations in a scalable and cost‑effective way

This is a leadership role on a team that is core to Zipline’s success, and is therefore not an entry level position. Success in this role will require a disciplined and first‑principles approach, with a deep connection and understanding at the system and product levels. You’ll be naturally curious and able to work seamlessly with individuals and teams both inside and outside of your core engineering / scientific discipline, as well as regulatory, operations and business partners.

Experience in many of the following areas are critical to your ability to contribute at the right level:

• You will have a minimum of 5+ years of industry experience, and either be a proven people leader or clearly ready to own and develop a small team (3-5 direct reports).
• Advanced proficiency with Python and libraries commonly used for data analysis, e.g., Pandas, Numpy, Scipy, and Matplotlib, XArray, NETCDF. In addition, you’ll be able to learn new languages and libraries quickly for use in daily work (eg. Rust, C++), and have experience working in a multideveloper environment.
• Familiarity with datasets, data formats, and data tools common to weather and radar applications; in particular you’ll understand how to efficiently process large datasets across distributed systems.
• As well as a strong understanding of descriptive statistics, probability and linear algebra, you will have mastered a wide range of machine learning and statistical techniques, and developed an intuition for what tool to apply in every situation.
• Adept at…