---
title: 'Head of Product Operations at Zipline'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-product-operations-zipline-south-san-francisco-california-1n9kqckxpphc'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-13'
---

# Head of Product Operations at Zipline 

- **Company:** Zipline 
- **Location:** South San Francisco California, United States
- **Posted:** 2026-08-07
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-13
- **Apply:** https://www.zipline.com/open-roles/7833503003?gh_jid=7833503003

## Job description

## 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 and The Role

As Head of Product Operations, you will build and lead Zipline's Product Operations function. Your mission is to make the product organization dramatically more effective by improving how products are planned, built, launched, measured, and operated.

You'll work across Product Management, Engineering, Design, Operations, Data Science, Commercial, Customer Success, and Executive Leadership to establish the operating system for product development at Zipline.

This is not a traditional program management role. You will define operating rhythms, improve product quality, create organizational leverage through better tooling and processes, and ensure every product launch is measurable, operationally ready, and delivers meaningful customer outcomes.

As Zipline scales autonomous delivery around the world, Product Operations will become the connective tissue between product strategy and operational execution.

In your first year, you will establish a consistent operating cadence for product planning and reviews, standardize launch readiness and post-launch review processes, improve cross-functional execution, reduce time-to-launch while increasing launch quality, act as the conduit between headquarters and the field, and become a trusted leader for operational excellence within Product.

This role is based in South San Francisco, with regular onsite collaboration and occasional travel to launch sites to observe operations, gat

## What You'll Do

Build the Product Operating System

- Build and continuously improve the operating model for Product Management across planning, roadmaps, reviews, launches, and post-launch measurement.
- Standardize product development processes without introducing unnecessary bureaucracy.
- Design operating cadences including roadmap reviews, quarterly planning, launch readiness reviews, and executive product reviews.

Improve Product Quality

- Define launch readiness standards across engineering, operations, legal, safety, customer support, and commercial teams.
- Ensure every launch includes clear success metrics, operational playbooks, monitoring, rollback plans, and ownership.
- Drive post-launch reviews and ensure learnings are incorporated into future development.

Drive Operational Excellence

- Build dashboards that measure product health, launch quality, adoption, reliability, and customer outcomes.
- Partner with Data Science to define product KPIs and improve measurement across the organization.
- Identify systemic bottlenecks slowing product delivery and implement scalable solutions.

Enable Product Teams

- Develop templates, documentation, decision frameworks, and tooling that allow Product Managers to spend more time solving customer problems.
- Improve the quality of PRDs, decision documents, experimentation plans, and roadmap communication.
- Own the Product team's internal knowledge management systems.

Improve Cross-Functional Execution

- Partner closely with Engineering, Design, Operations, Commercial, Customer Success, Marketplace Operations, and Safety to improve cross-functional alignment.
- Create clear ownership boundaries, decision-making frameworks, and escalation paths.
- Reduce organizational friction between product teams and operational stakeholders.

Operationalize Product Launches

- Lead cross-functional launch planning for major initiatives.
- Coordinate readiness across customer communications, training, support documentation, field operations, monitoring, analytics, and incident response.
- Ensure launches transition smoothly from development into day-to-day operations.

Build Product Feedback Loops

- Establish scalable systems for collecting insights from field operations, customer support, commercial teams, and customers.
- Ensure product teams have continuous visibility into operational pain points and customer feedback.
- Translate recurring issues into actionable product opportunities.

Scale the Organization

- Help define planning frameworks, portfolio management, resource allocation, and organizational priorities.
- Introduce best practices from high-performing technology organizations while adapting them to Zipline's unique operational environment.
- Build and lead a high-performing Product Operations team over time.

## What You'll Bring

- 10+ years of experience in Product Operations, Product Management, Program Management, Strategy & Operations, or related leadership roles.
- Experience building Product Operations functions at a high-growth technology company.
- Strong understanding of modern product development practices, product organizations, and software delivery.
- Proven ability to improve organizational effectiveness through better systems, tooling, and operational rigor.
- Excellent analytical skills with experience defining KPIs, building dashboards, and measuring organizational performance.
- Exceptional cross-functional leadership and influence without direct authority.
- Strong program management skills with experience coordinating large, complex product launches.
- Excellent written communication with experience producing executive-ready decision documents, operating reviews, and strategic planning materials.
- Comfortable working with engineers, designers, data scientists, and operational leaders.
- Demonstrated ability to simplify complex organizational problems into scalable processes.
- Experience with SQL, analytics platforms, experimentation frameworks, or operational metrics is a plus.
- Experience supporting products with significant operational, logistics, marketplace, or hardware components is preferred.

What Else You Need To Know

Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws or our own sensibilities.

We value diversity at Zipline and welcome applications from those who are traditionally underrepresented in tech. If you like the sound of this position but are not sure if you are the perfect fit, please apply! Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.

As set forth in Zipline ’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

## About Zipline 

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Zipline is an American robotics company that operates the world’s largest autonomous drone delivery service, transporting medical supplies, food, and retail goods across multiple continents.
- **Entity Type**: Private (early-stage startup)
- **Headquarters**: South San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: March 2014
- **Founders**: Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, Keenan Wyrobek, Ryan Oksenhorn, William Hetzler

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Logistics / Drone delivery
- **Target customers**: B2B (healthcare systems, governments, retailers like Walmart and Chipotle) and B2C (home delivery via the Zipline app)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: “Build the first logistics system that serves all people equally” – initially focused on saving lives by delivering blood and medicine to remote communities, now expanded to instant urban delivery.

## Products & Services
- **Platform 1 (P1)**: Long-range, rural delivery drone. Carries up to 4 lbs, roundtrip range 120+ miles, cruise speed 60 mph. Uses parachute delivery. Designed for enterprise, government, and healthcare supply chains.
- **Platform 2 (P2)**: Urban/suburban home delivery drone. Carries up to 8 lbs, service radius 10 miles (or 24 miles one way), cruise speed 70 mph. Delivers via a tether from up to 300 ft, allowing contactless drop-off. Launched in 2025 and used for food, retail, and health products.
- **Zipping Points**: Modular ground stations that allow businesses to load orders onto drones without specialized equipment.
- **FlightIQ**: Advanced onboard autonomy and perception suite for safe navigation and delivery.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available
- **Key Metric**: 2 million commercial deliveries completed (as of January 2026) and 130 million autonomous miles flown.[wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipline_(drone_delivery_company))[zipline-fact-sheet](https://www.zipline.com/about/zipline-fact-sheet)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not disclosed in available sources. Key partners include Walmart, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Crumbl, Blaze Pizza, Wendy’s, and many other restaurant brands. In healthcare, works with more than 5,000 hospitals and health centers.
- **Growth Signals**: Expanded into urban home delivery in 2025 (P2) with service in Pea Ridge, Arkansas and 20+ communities in Dallas-Fort Worth. Obtained FAA authorization for beyond visual line of sight operations. Reports 56% decrease in maternal mortality and 66% decrease in missed malaria treatments in served regions.[zipline-fact-sheet](https://www.zipline.com/about/zipline-fact-sheet)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Autonomous drone fleet**: One of the world’s largest commercial deployments of autonomous robots, with custom software running on Nvidia chips.
- **FAA approval**: All operations and aircraft are FAA-approved, including pioneering use of Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic Management (UTM).
- **Quieter than road vehicles**: Drones hover high and descend on a tether, generating noise lower than common neighborhood sounds.
- **Extensive testing**: One of the largest aviation testing campaigns, with operations in rain, wind, and storms.
- **Integrated logistics platform**: Beyond drones, Zipline provides warehousing, inventory management, cold chain storage, and fulfillment software.

## Strategic Focus
- Scaling the Platform 2 urban delivery network across the U.S., particularly through partnerships with major retailers and restaurants.
- Deepening healthcare impact by expanding into new countries and product categories (prescriptions, groceries, convenience items).
- Continuing to reduce delivery times and environmental footprint (0 emissions per delivery, compared to automotive delivery).

## Why Work Here
- **Culture values**: Ownership & Accountability, Direct Feedback & Communication, Continuous Improvement, Customer Obsession, Servant Leadership (as stated on careers page). Emphasis on “Make it matter” and mission-driven work.[careers](https://www.zipline.com/careers)
- **Work environment**: Headquartered in South San Francisco with hardware and software teams. The company assembles its drones in America. Likely on-site given the hardware focus; remote/hybrid policy not explicitly stated.
- **Impact**: Opportunity to work on life-saving technology (60,000+ lives saved) and shape the future of instant logistics.
- **Engineering culture**: Build and iterate on autonomous systems, airspace deconfliction, and large-scale robotics deployments.

## Sources
1. [Zipline Careers](https://www.zipline.com/careers)
2. [Zipline Homepage](https://www.zipline.com/)
3. [About Zipline](https://www.zipline.com/about)
4. [Zipline Fact Sheet](https://www.zipline.com/about/zipline-fact-sheet)
5. [Wikipedia - Zipline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipline_(drone_delivery_company))
6. [Greenhouse Careers Page](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/flyzipline)

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