Technical Program Manager (Cloud Infra, Data, Validation Platforms)

Join Zipline as a Technical Program Manager for Cloud, Data & Validation Platforms. In this role, you will own the execution of platform capabilities that enable safe and repeatable launches, impacting fleet availability, launch cadence, and safety validation. You will be based in South San Francisco and expected to be onsite at least 4 days a week. Your responsibilities will include defining goals and milestones for platform initiatives, leading migrations and rollouts, setting and reporting program metrics, and driving operational readiness. You should have a minimum of 6+ years of technical program management experience and a strong background in cloud infrastructure, data pipelines, and validation environments.

• Ownership of execution of platform capabilities that enable safe, repeatable launches and fleet scale, including cloud and on-prem infrastructure, data ingestion and analytics pipelines, CI/CD and developer productivity systems, simulation and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) validation environments, and telemetry/logging backplanes.
• Leading migrations and rollouts, including owning migration plans, rollback strategies, runbooks, operator training, and phased rollout checklists for on-prem/cloud changes affecting validation or production fleets.
• Establishing program dashboards and SLOs for platform health and developer velocity, and running the first three weekly program reviews with cross-functional owners.
• Ability to make and defend hard tradeoffs on performance, cost, and safety; experienced at convening technical and ops stakeholders and driving binding decisions
• Comfortable with operational intensity: on‑call coordination for launches, occasional off‑hours work for field tests/launches, and travel to test or customer sites (up to 10%)
• Minimum 6+ years technical program management experience owning platform, cloud infrastructure, data, or validation programs that served multiple engineering teams; demonstrated ownership of large migrations, automation, or validation initiatives
• Prior experience working with cloud and on‑prem infrastructure, data pipelines (streaming and batch), CI/CD systems, and simulation or HIL validation environments. Direct experience in safety‑critical or regulated systems (aviation, medical devices, or similar) is a plus
• Education/tech background: BS in CS, EE, Systems Engineering or equivalent experience; former software or systems engineer on cloud, infra, data, or validation teams is strongly preferred
• Track record of shipping measurable velocity and reliability improvements with concrete, tracked metrics (examples: % reduction in build/test time, SLO attainment, HIL throughput gains). Be prepared to share baseline→result examples in interviews
• Strong program control skills: risk registers, Gantt/timeline ownership, rollout/rollback plans, runbooks, and structured postmortems with tracked remediation items
• Location requirement: South San Francisco office presence minimum 4 days/week