Program Manager - Growth & Profitability

Socket.dev; South San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Zipline, headquartered in South San Francisco, seeks a senior program leader to drive a high-growth, cross-functional Growth & Profitability initiative. You will integrate strategy, operations, product, sales, and marketing with hardware engineering and flight software to deliver measurable business results.

You will partner with the executive accountable for commercial cross-organizational decisions, shaping priorities, ownership, and rapid decision-making across metros and partners.

Qualifications

• 12+ years in senior operating, program, GM, product, strategy-and-ops, transformation, or exec-office roles with cross-company impact.
• Ability to influence without formal authority and handle sensitive business context.
• Strong judgment across growth, pricing, capacity, and unit economics.
• Ability to translate strategy into actionable decisions and updates.
• Experience building lightweight operating mechanisms that enable ownership and speed.
• High agency, low ego, and willingness to challenge assumptions using first-principles.

Responsibilities

• Set program outcomes and tradeoffs with the DRI.
• Own cross-program integration and expose dependencies and gaps.
• Serve as the DRI’s field deputy and drive decisions to closure.
• Lead at the seams and define steady-state ownership and handoffs.
• Create the program’s source of truth and concise updates for reviews.
• Stay close to operating reality by engaging metros, operators, partners, and customers.

Skills

Cross-functional leadership

P&L judgment

Strategy & operations

Executive communication

Hardware networks

Travel readiness

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.

The Opportunity

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).

What you’ll do

• 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.

What Great Looks Like

• 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.

What You’ll Bring

• 12+ 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 results.
• Credibility with executives and functional leaders: you can influence difficult decisions without reporting-line authority and handle sensitive business and organizational context with judgment.
• Strong P&L judgment across growth, customer behavior, partner economics, pricing, capacity, utilization, and unit economics.
• The 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 updates.
• Experience building lightweight operating mechanisms that create ownership, speed, and follow-through without bureaucracy.
• High 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 outcome.
• Experience in one of multi-sided marketplaces, logistics, delivery, mobility, aviation, infrastructure, or other hardware-enabled, regulated, or operations-intensive networks.

What Else You Need to know

This is an in-person role based at Zipline’s South San Francisco headquarters. It requires regular travel to operating metros and partner locations to stay close to customers, teams, launches, and operating reality.

The starting cash range for this role is $200,000-$300,000. Please note that this is a target, starting cash range for a candidate who meets the minimum qualifications for this role. The final cash pay for this role will depend on a variety of factors, including a specific candidate's experience, qualifications, skills, working location, and projected impact. The total compensation package for this role may also include: equity compensation; discretionary annual or performance bonuses; sales incentives; benefits such as medical, dental and vision insurance; paid time off; and more.

Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, mental or physical disability, medical condition, genetic information, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, military or veteran status, citizenship, or other characteristics protected by state, federal or local law or our other policies.

We value diversity at Zipline and welcome applications from those who are traditionally underrepresented in tech.

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.