Overview In this role you will own end-to-end program delivery for test maintenance across Zipline's test sites, ensuring mission-ready aircraft and sites to sustain flight-test cadence. You will bridge Maintenance Ops Engineering, Flight Test, Product and site operations to remove blockers, tighten change control, and convert learnings into repeatable processes. Your work supports scalable operations and safer, faster validation of new hardware. This is a hands-on, cross-functional role with a clear impact on fleet readiness and commercial timelines.
Responsibilities- Own program-level delivery for test maintenance across multiple test sites: set milestones, assign owners, enforce deadlines, and ensure outcomes.
- Translate floor-level maintenance needs into program plans covering tooling, parts, documentation, training, inspections, baselines, and return-to-service assumptions.
- Serve as the primary link between Maintenance Ops Engineering, Flight Test, Engineering, Product, and site operations; drive cross-functional decisions and escalate risks.
- Maintain configuration and modification tracking for active test aircraft; ensure change-control, audits, and corrective actions closures.
- Track and report readiness metrics and SLAs (e.g., campaign-ready %, MTTR, blocker closure) on campaign cadences.
- Lead Test Maintenance Program Updates for leadership and site teams to surface blockers and resource gaps.
- Design dashboards, checklists, and workflows to reduce administrative burden and accelerate maintenance.
- Turn test-site learnings into standard work, tooling specs, docs, training inputs, and go/no-go criteria for commercial handoff.
- Lead or coordinate maintenance validation campaigns and decide on scale vs rework based on readiness and risk.
Key requirements- 5+ years in program management, maintenance operations, test operations, or related technical operations with multi-site ownership
- Direct experience with aircraft maintenance or aviation test operations; large-scale, high-tempo environments preferred
- Proven ability to own outcomes, set deadlines, force tradeoffs, escalate, and close actions with measurable impact
- Hands-on configuration management, change control, inspections/audit readiness, and hardware modification tracking
- Experience building dashboards and operational metrics to drive prioritization
- Comfort working under time pressure with tangible impact on schedules and safety/compliance
- Strong communication skills for cross-functional meetings and concise updates
- Proficiency with Jira, Confluence, spreadsheets, dashboards, and distributed communication platforms
- Onsite presence at test sites with ability to travel and adapt to campaign schedules
- cross-functional collaboration
- clear communication
- results-oriented problem solving
- Jira
- Confluence
- dashboards
