Zipline is hiring a Senior Manager, Data Platform & Autonomy Infrastructure to lead the teams and systems that turn real-world flight data into learning and action. This role owns the end-to-end data platform for autonomy and operations—from onboard logging and ingestion, to postprocessing, sampling, and curated datasets used by autonomy, hardware, operations, and business teams. You will set technical direction, build and lead the organization, and ensure these systems operate reliably at >1 million flights per day with high uptime.

Responsibilities

Define the long-term strategy and roadmap for Zipline’s data, autonomy, and ML-enabling infrastructure
Establish architectural standards across logging, ingestion, processing, storage, access/visualization, and ML training and evaluation
Balance reliability, performance, cost, and developer productivity across the platform
Support a diverse set of internal customers, including hardware teams, autonomy/software teams, and analytics/business teams
Support rapid root-cause analysis across autonomy, hardware, and operations
Partner with autonomy and validation teams to close the loop between real-world data and development
Design systems that scale beyond 1 million flights per day without linear growth in cost or operational complexity
Set direction and accountability for onboard and offboard data logging systems
Make principled decisions about what data to collect, retain, and prioritize under bandwidth, storage, and cost constraints
Lead development of tooling to identify rare, novel, and safety-relevant scenarios from large-scale flight data
Define sampling strategies that maximize signal for autonomy evaluation, simulation, and ML training
Build and operate infrastructure that supports reproducible training and evaluation for autonomy ML workflows
Enable scalable pipelines for dataset generation, experiment tracking, and offline evaluation
Establish strong reliability, observability, and operational practices for ML data flows and evaluation runs

Requirements

10+ years of experience building large-scale data, infrastructure, or autonomy-adjacent systems
Experience leading senior engineers or multiple teams
Strong background in robotics, autonomy, logistics, or other data-intensive physical systems
Deep understanding of logging, ingestion, processing, and data platform architecture
Experience working in environments where data is safety-critical, expensive, and operationally constrained
Strong communication skills and sound technical judgment

Benefits

The starting cash range for this role is $250,000 - $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.