Executive Assistant, Chief Hardware Officer & Head of Autonomy

About the role

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.

Responsibilities

• Partner directly with Jo Mardall, our Chief Hardware Officer, and CJ Moore, our Head of Autonomy, to manage their calendars, priorities, commitments, and operating cadence across hardware, autonomy, flight software, fleet reliability, operations, and executive forums.
• Own complex calendar management with strong business judgment, ensuring their time is spent on the highest-impact decisions, escalations, reviews, and team priorities.
• Prepare leaders for technical operating meetings by gathering agendas, context, pre-reads, open decisions, owners, dates, and follow-up items across Slack, Gmail, Drive, Confluence, Jira, and internal systems.
• Help coordinate critical forums such as fleet health reviews, release and validation discussions, hardware/software syncs, architecture reviews, escalation meetings, recruiting debriefs, and executive operating cadences.
• Track follow-ups across technical workstreams, ensuring decisions, owners, deadlines, revisit dates, and open questions do not get lost after fast-moving meetings.
• Support escalation hygiene by helping route the right topics to the right leaders, forums, and timelines while maintaining clear visibility on status and next steps.
• Carefully coordinate complex domestic and international travel, including itineraries, logistics, meeting preparation, and contingency planning.
• Support recruiting and hiring workflows for senior and technical candidates, including interview scheduling, debrief coordination, candidate follow-up, and confidential process management.
• Represent Jo, CJ, and the broader technical leadership team with professionalism, clarity, warmth, and high standards in interactions across Zipline and externally.
• Proactively identify ways to improve how information flows, meetings are prepared, decisions are captured, and follow-through happens across both leaders’ organizations.

Requirements

7+ years of experience as an Executive Assistant, ideally supporting senior technical, engineering, product, operations, hardware, software, robotics, aerospace, manufacturing, or infrastructure leaders. Exceptional judgment and discretion, especially when handling confidential technical, operational, recruiting, executive, or people-related information. Strong ability to operate in technical environments. You do not need to make technical decisions, but you should be comfortable around topics like aircraft reliability, software releases, validation, hardware root cause analysis, fleet operations, and engineering escalations. Excellent calendar, meeting, travel, and logistics management skills in a high-velocity environment with shifting priorities. Outstanding written and verbal communication skills. You can turn messy discussion into clear follow-up, owners, dates, and next steps. High ownership and follow-through. You notice dropped balls, close loops, and keep important work moving without needing constant direction. Strong prioritization instincts and the ability to protect executive focus while staying responsive to urgent operational needs. Comfort working across executives, senior engineers, program managers, recruiters, People Partners, operations leaders, and field teams. Strong attention to detail and a high bar for preparation, accuracy, and reliability. A service-oriented mindset with backbone. You are helpful, thoughtful, and proactive, while also comfortable pushing for clarity, protecting priorities, and escalating when needed. Energy, resilience, and enthusiasm for supporting leaders whose work directly affects the safety, reliability, and scale of Zipline’s global operations.

Qualifications

The starting cash range for this role is $150,000 - $200,000. Please note that this is a target starting cash range for a candidate who meets the minimum qualifications for this role. The final cash payment for this role will depend on various factors, including a specific candidate's experience, qualifications, skills, working location, and projected impact. The total compensation package for this role may include equity compensation; discretionary annual or performance bonuses; benefits such as medical, dental, and vision insurance; paid time off; and more.