Strategic Finance Manager, Manufacturing
Zipline · South San Francisco, California, USA ·
- Category
- Finance
- Experience
- 3+ years
About Zipline
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. With more than 140 million commercial autonomous miles safely flown, Zipline is redefining access to healthcare, consumer products, and food across the globe.
We operate at a global scale and are looking for practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth. Our team is motivated by building systems that have a direct, meaningful impact on people’s lives and by scaling the future of logistics. We are seeking people who sculpt from first principles, enjoy facing adversity, and can do the impossible at record breaking speeds.
About You and The Role
Zipline is seeking a Manufacturing Finance Partner to join our Strategic Finance team to help make manufacturing performance measurable, explainable, and economically actionable as we prepare for hyperscale. As manufacturing expands rapidly over the coming years, this role will help build the financial operating lens needed to scale with that growth. This is an ideal opportunity for someone who enjoys translating operational reality into financial insight. You will partner closely with Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Quality, Engineering, Operations, and Accounting to establish cost truth, improve inventory and cash visibility, create actionable variance analysis, and build the reporting cadence that helps leaders make sharper scaling decisions. You will be successful here if you can thrive in a fast-changing manufacturing environment while knowing what great looks like in the future. The work is not just reporting the numbers; it is helping lead the team from evolving systems and processes toward a scaled operating model with clear ownership, reliable data, and decision-quality economics.
What You'll Do
- Own manufacturing finance reporting, forecasting, and variance analysis across cost, labor, inventory, cash, and operating expense.
- Partner with Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Quality, Engineering, Operations, and Accounting to understand performance drivers and turn them into clear business actions.
- Build financial models and decision support for product cost, production planning, capacity, cost-down initiatives, make-buy analysis, and manufacturing investments.
- Develop dashboards, reporting, and operating cadences that give leaders better visibility into manufacturing performance and unit economics.
- Analyze key operational drivers such as labor efficiency, material usage, rework, scrap, yield, throughput, WIP, E&O, and production volume.
- Improve the data, systems, and processes that support scalable manufacturing finance, including ERP, inventory, and operational reporting workflows.
What You'll Bring
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Finance, Accounting, Economics, Engineering, or another quantitative discipline.
- Approximately 3+ years of experience in Manufacturing Finance, FP&A, Operations
- Finance, Cost Accounting, Supply Chain Finance, or another analytical finance role.
- Strong understanding of budgeting, forecasting, variance analysis, financial statements, and operational performance drivers.
- Experience analyzing manufacturing, hardware, supply chain, inventory, or other operational cost drivers.
- Advanced Excel or Google Sheets skills, including financial modeling and scenario analysis.
- Experience working with ERP, MRP, MES, inventory, or operational data systems such as NetSuite, SAP, Oracle, Zerp, or similar tools.
- Ability to work with large datasets, identify the business drivers behind the numbers, and communicate findings clearly to finance and non-finance stakeholders.
- Strong problem-solving skills, high ownership, and the ability to operate effectively when processes and data are still evolving.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in high-growth hardware, aerospace, robotics, automotive, consumer electronics, advanced manufacturing, or similarly complex operational environments.
- Familiarity with SQL, Looker, Tableau, Power BI, or similar analytics and business intelligence tools.
- Experience with inventory analysis, WIP, E&O, cycle counts, rework, scrap, yield, throughput, or capacity planning.
- Experience supporting manufacturing cost reduction, product cost modeling, make-buy decisions, or supplier cost analysis.
- Familiarity with standard costing, expected cost models, BOM governance, or cost accounting concepts.
- Experience partnering with Engineering, Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Quality, Operations, Accounting, and systems teams.
- Passion for building scalable processes, improving data quality, and turning ambiguity into operating clarity.
You'll Be Successful If You
- Enjoy understanding how products are built and how operational decisions affect cost, throughput, and cash.
- Naturally ask "why" when performance moves, and can separate symptoms from root causes.
- Can distinguish factory-owned execution from upstream design, supplier, quality, or launch-related drivers.
- Build strong relationships across Manufacturing, Engineering, Supply Chain, Quality, Operations, and Accounting.
- Can independently investigate messy operational data and turn it into practical recommendations.
- Balance analytical rigor with business judgment and a bias toward action.
- Thrive in environments where the right answer requires building the model, improving the process, and tightening the data at the same time.
- Take ownership of your work and continuously look for ways to make recurring finance processes more scalable.
What Else You Need To Know
The starting cash range for this role is $130,000 - $185,000. 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.
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!
Voluntary Self-Identification
For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.
As set forth in Zipline ’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.