Program Manager (Growth & Profitability)

Zipline; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 210,000 - 270,000; Full time

Job summary

Zipline seeks a deeply experienced Growth & Profitability program leader to orchestrate cross-functional work spanning marketplace strategy, network optimization, product, sales, marketing, hardware engineering, flight software and operations.

You will partner with the DRI to define outcomes, measures, and ownership, align teams, surface risks, and accelerate decision-making to scale a high-growth autonomous delivery business.

Qualifications

• 12+ years in senior operating, program, GM, or strategy roles.
• Proven track record leading cross-company initiatives to measurable results.
• Experience in marketplaces/logistics or hardware-enabled networks is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Define program outcomes and tradeoffs with the DRI.
• Own cross-program integration and expose dependencies.
• Lead day-to-day decisions across functions and drive to closure.
• Create a single source of truth with metrics and reviews.
• Stay close to operating realities and adapt plans quickly.

Skills

Cross-functional leadership

First-principles thinking

P&L judgment

Program management

Executive stakeholder management

Job description

• Zipline has spent the last decade proving autonomous delivery can be safe, reliable, and life-changing at global scale. We are now focused on scaling that network into the world’s first high growth, profitable autonomous delivery business
• The number of partners offering delivery through Zipline grew 13x in the first half of 2026. The next challenge is to make that growth compound: increasing customer demand and love, helping partners succeed, and demonstrating economics that improve with scale. That is the charter of Zipline’s Growth & Profitability program
• This program brings together marketplace strategy, network optimization, product, sales, and marketing to ensure that everything connects with hardware engineering, flight software, and operations. We need a deeply experienced program leader to integrate the seams so it all adds up to efficient business results
• In this role you will partner directly with the executive accountable for commercial cross-organizational program decisions, the Directly Responsible Individual (DRI)
• Set the program outcomes and tradeoffs. With the DRI, define a small set of measures linking growth, customer and partner adoption, capacity, service quality, utilization, unit economics, and margin
• Own cross-program integration. Translate priorities in both directions; and expose dependencies, resource conflicts, ownership gaps, and organizational barriers
• Serve as the DRI’s field deputy. Make day-to-day cross-functional calls within the delegated mandate, drive decisions to closure, and bring the DRI well-framed choices when their judgment or authority is required
• Lead at the seams. Drive outcomes no function can deliver alone and help define steady-state ownership and handoff timeliness
• Create the program’s source of truth and communication system. Keep metrics, milestones, decisions, risks, and cross-team asks current; use concise updates and operating reviews to surface issues while the company still has good choices
• Stay close to operating reality. Spend time with metro teams, operators, partners, and customers; test headquarters assumptions against field evidence and adapt the plan quickly
• Customer experience, community love, customer growth, repeat usage, partner outcomes, capacity utilization, and unit economics improve together
• Metro launches, partner activations, and operational changes move faster and shift from one-off heroics to a repeatable operating model
• You ensure decisions close faster because leaders share a current view of priorities, ownership, tradeoffs, dependencies, and risk; avoidable surprises are rare
• The DRI focuses on decisions that need their authority, while functional leaders feel accelerated by you—not displaced or burdened by process

Credibility with executives and functional leaders: you can influence difficult decisions without reporting-line authority and handle sensitive business and organizational context with judgmentExperience building lightweight operating mechanisms that create ownership, speed, and follow-through without bureaucracyHigh agency and low ego: you have sufficient fluency across various domains, will challenge assumptions with first-principles reasoning, change your mind when the evidence is better, and stay accountable through the outcomeStrong P&L judgment across growth, customer behavior, partner economics, pricing, capacity, utilization, and unit economicsThe range to move from long-term strategy to quantitative detail and frontline execution, and the communication skill to turn fragmented context into crisp decisions, plans, and updates12+ years in progressively senior operating, program, GM, product, strategy-and-operations, transformation, or executive-office roles, with a record of personally leading consequential cross-company work to measurable commercial or operating resultsExperience in one of multi-sided marketplaces, logistics, delivery, mobility, aviation, infrastructure, or other hardware-enabled, regulated, or operations-intensive networks