Director of Cybersecurity

Title: Director of Cybersecurity Location: South San Francisco, California, USA

About You and The Role 

Zipline operates autonomous delivery systems spanning cloud services, customer and operational data, embedded software, aircraft, and field infrastructure. Security must protect those systems, customers, partners, and the people who rely on them while enabling engineering teams to deliver safely and quickly.

As Director of Cybersecurity, you will own company-wide information security and privacy strategy and lead a lean, technical organization across application, product and corporate security. You will first focus the company on its most consequential risks and remediation decisions, then build the engineering capabilities, controls, and operating model that scale with Zipline. You will define and communicate a clear company-wide security strategy, align leaders around it, and work hands-on with engineers to build and operate the security capabilities that address our highest-priority risks.

As Zipline continues to grow, you’ll have the opportunity to grow with it, taking on broader scope and organizational leadership as the company’s needs evolve.

What You'll Do

• Set security and privacy strategy, risk posture, roadmap, operating model, and investment priorities across product, infrastructure, data, corporate technology, and physical systems.
• Identify and sequence the company’s highest-consequence risks, driving clear remediation decisions with Engineering, IT, Legal, Safety, Operations, and Physical Security.
• Be a pragmatic problem solver who helps engineering teams move quickly and securely. Make tradeoffs clear, find practical ways to reduce risk, and build tools and processes that make secure development easy.
• Communicate material security and privacy risk clearly to company leaders and partners, translating technical findings into business tradeoffs and investment decisions.
• Lead a software security engineering team that owns security capabilities in production, contributes fixes and reusable platforms, and works alongside Engineering to eliminate systemic vulnerability classes.
• Build and develop a high-performing team through hiring, coaching, clear expectations, and direct performance management.
• Establish security architecture and practices for identity, access control, secrets, data protection, applications, cloud infrastructure, embedded software, aircraft, and field infrastructure.
• Lead threat modeling, testing, vulnerability management, incident response, and security reviews; measure risk coverage, remediation, readiness, control effectiveness, and secure-engineering adoption.

What You'll Bring

• Proven senior leadership experience in a highly technical, fast-paced organization, with experience operating at scale and leading security through rapid growth. Demonstrated experience owning security strategy and hands-on execution across information security, product security, or security engineering.
• A software engineering foundation, including experience building production software, security systems, or technical controls.
• Technical depth across application, infrastructure, cloud, identity, data, and hardware security.
• Experience securing safety-critical or cyber-physical systems, such as embedded, robotics, aerospace, automotive, or industrial technology.
• Experience leading serious security incident response and assessing threats from sophisticated external attackers.
• Judgment balancing security, privacy, legal obligations, safety, engineering velocity, customer needs, and business objectives while working directly in a lean team.

What Else You Need To Know

This role is based in our South San Francisco office and requires working onsite five days a week.

The starting cash range for this role is $230,000 - $300,000; please note that this is a target, starting cash range for a candidate who meets the minimum qualifications for this role. We are always open to negotiation. 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; overtime pay; 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, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws or our own sensibilities.

We value diversity at Zipline and welcome applications from those who are traditionally underrepresented in tech. If you like the sound of this position but are not sure if you are the perfect fit, please apply!