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# Head of Weather Systems

- **Company:** Zipline
- **Location:** South San Francisco, CA, United States
- **Experience:** Expert
- **Salary:** $185,000.0 - $255,000.0
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** Amazon Web Services, C++ (Programming Language), Python (Programming Language), NetCDF, NumPy, Rust (Programming Language), Data Ingestion, Pandas, Kubernetes, Apache Kafka, Operational Systems, Stream Processing
- **Published:** August 5, 2026
- **Apply:** https://www.businessworkforce.com/job.asp?id=3342121096&tx=CT323TYI&pt=1&aff=0B19D771-A501-4A5E-8338-2A822B784D54&utm_source=Job%20Feed&utm_medium=textkernel&utm_campaign=DE&utm_term=0B19D771-A501-4A5E-8338-2A822B784D54

## About the Role

* Minimum 6+ years industry experience shipping mission-critical decision systems; demonstrable ownership of automated operational decision logic in production at scale.
 * Required technical skills: deep fluency in scientific Python (Pandas, NumPy, Xarray, NetCDF), experience with time-series/streaming systems (Kafka or equivalent), and comfort reading/working with production stacks (Kubernetes, AWS, Rust/C++ codebases). Ability to prototype and ship models into production pipelines.
 * Domain expertise: 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.
 * Systems judgment: experience defining quantitative metrics (false-positive/negative tradeoffs), designing validation experiments (simulation + field tests), and documenting failure modes and rollback criteria.
 * Operations intensity: history working with 24/7 operational systems, incident response, and SLAs; comfortable making and owning high-consequence trade-offs under uncertainty.
 * Leadership: experience leading or directly influencing small cross-disciplinary teams and driving measurable improvements in uptime, throughput, or reliability within 6â??12 months.
 * Logistics & constraints: must be able to work onsite in South San Francisco full-time and travel internationally
 * Must-have traits: decisive under uncertainty, rigorous about validation and failure modes, able to translate scientific complexity into deterministic operational rules and measurable outcomes.

## Description

You will lead Zipline's Weather Intelligence team, that defines and enforces the environmental limits under which our aircraft operate safely and reliably. This owner-level role sits at the intersection of meteorology, software, flight operations, and safety. Your work makes automated go/no-go decisions for thousands of missions every day, directly affecting uptime, delivery throughput, customer experience, and regulatory safety posture. You will operate inside a high-velocity global logistics and aviation environment where decisions must be defensible to operators, regulators, and partners, and where system failures have operational and safety consequences.

What You'll Do

 * Own end-to-end development and operational performance of the automated weather intelligence and risk system used for mission go/no-go decisions across Zipline's operational regions. You are the single technical and product owner for system behavior and reliability.
 * Translate meteorological uncertainty into concrete, testable operational limits and encode those into automated decision logic used in daily operations.
 * Define and measure success: set quantitative targets (e.g., uptime improvement, false downtime rate, missed-risk rate, delivery throughput impact) and deliver within the first 12 months measurable improvements compared with our first year of commercial operations.
 * Lead validation efforts using a combination of simulation, historical log replay, flight test, and live operations; design experiments and acceptance criteria for new models, sensors, and rules before production rollout.
 * Prioritize trade-offs across safety margin, operational availability, sensing cost, model complexity, and deployment speed; document failure modes and rollback criteria for all changes.
 * Own cross-functional execution with Flight Operations, Safety, Flight Sciences, Simulation, Field Sites, and Engineering: define SLAs, incident roles, and escalation paths for weather-driven incidents.
 * Drive the roadmap for sensing (ground and air), data ingestion, model tooling, and runtime decision services; sponsor necessary infrastructure (streaming, simulation, monitoring) to help meet operational SLAs.
 * Hire, mentor, and manage a small technical team (3â??5 engineers/scientists) or partner with an existing engineering manager while retaining product and technical ownership of the weather system.
 * Operate an on-call / incident rotation for weather-system outages; run post-incident reviews, own corrective action plans, and feedback into validation and deployment processes.


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