Forward Deployed Operator

WindBorne Systems; Redwood City (CA); On-site; USD 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k)

Dental insurance

Health insurance

Vision insurance

Unlimited PTO

Stock Option Plan

Office food and beverages

Job summary

WindBorne Systems in Redwood City, CA is seeking an Operations Lead to own a meaningful slice of our constellation. You will coordinate with engineering, manufacturing, and Flight Control, run point on exercises, and oversee hardware rollouts while identifying fleet-wide issues.

You will travel globally to gather data, create visualizations, and communicate results to customers, adapting as priorities shift in a fast-paced environment.

Qualifications

• Ability to coordinate across engineering, manufacturing, and flight control.
• Interest in balloons, atmospheric science, radio, airspace, and defense tech.

Responsibilities

• Run point on a military exercise coordinating with engineering, manufacturing, and the Flight Control team, then close the loop with the customer on results.
• Coordinate the operational rollout of new hardware, like ocean sensing buoys or radio-ground stations.
• Identify recurring bugs that affect performance constellation-wide.
• Oversee the constellation’s response to a newly-appeared tropical storm, gather data, create visualizations, and communicate findings to stakeholders.
• Travel worldwide to perform unusual operations, deploy balloons, and set up temporary launch sites.

Skills

Multitasking

Customer communication

Adaptability

Learning mindset

Visualization tools

Tools

Visualization tools

Job description

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WindBorne Systems is supercharging weather forecasts with a unique proprietary data source: a global constellation of next‑generation smart weather balloons targeting the most critical atmospheric data. We design, manufacture, and operate our own balloons, using the data they collect to generate otherwise unattainable weather intelligence.

Our mission is to eliminate weather uncertainty, and in the process help humanity adapt to climate change, be that predicting hurricanes or speeding the adoption of renewables. We are building a future in which the planet is instrumented by thousands of our microballoons, eliminating gaps in our understanding of the planet and giving people and businesses the information they need to make critical decisions.

The constellation team keeps our fleet flying and decides where it goes. Day to day, most of our work centers on the 1% of edge cases—the novel, the weird, the unpredictable—and serves two functions: it's a testing ground where edge cases surface bugs and validate new capabilities, and it's forward‑deployed customer work where new features get demoed to and studied directly with customers in a hands‑on way. It's an unusually wide surface area, and we're hiring someone to own a meaningful slice of it.

Responsibilities

• Run point on a military exercise—coordinating with engineering on tech readiness, manufacturing on hardware volume, and the Flight Control team on in‑flight priorities, then closing the loop with the customer on results.
• Coordinate the operational rollout of new hardware, like ocean sensing buoys or radio‑ground stations.
• Identify recurring bugs that affect performance constellation‑wide.
• Oversee our constellation’s response to a newly‑appeared tropical storm—gathering the most interesting data while ensuring avoidance of other meteorological aircraft in the region, creating visualizations of our findings and communicating them to others.
• Travel all over the world to carry out unusual operations—whether that’s slogging through a swamp in Alabama to recover a balloon, or setting up a temporary launch site on an island in rural Scotland.

The work varies widely. Some weeks you’re heads‑down on documentation and tooling; other weeks you’re trying to shepherd a cluster of twenty balloons across the Pacific. Most weeks are somewhere in between.

Skills And Qualifications

• When a procedure doesn’t exist, you write it instead of waiting to be told it’s your job. You like keeping a lot of balls in the air, and you’re ready to dive into anything that needs to be done.
• Genuine curiosity about how the world works. The job involves balloons, atmospheric science, radio, airspace, and defense tech—you don’t need a background in any of these, but you should find them interesting enough to want to learn.
• You can sit across from a customer who’s never encountered our tech, and help them understand and trust the operations you’ve carried out. The constellation team is part of ops that is the product itself, and it matters how we present ourselves and communicate with external collaborators.
• Comfort with uncertainty and shifting priorities. Procedures evolve, hardware changes, customers reprioritize. You’re someone who finds this energizing rather than exhausting.

Benefits

• 401(k)
• Dental insurance
• Health insurance
• Vision insurance
• Unlimited PTO
• Stock Option Plan
• Office food and beverages

Salary: $90K–$120K. We are considering a range of backgrounds and experience levels for this position and will adjust our offers accordingly to be competitive with market rates.

Location: 1600 Bridge Parkway, Redwood Shores, CA. In person required.

What our hardware looks like