Operations Engineer Jobs in Palo Alto, CA

WindBorne Systems is supercharging weather forecasts with a unique proprietary data source: a global constellation of next-generation smart weather balloons targeting the most critical atmospheric data. We design, manufacture, and operate our own balloons, using the data they collect to generate otherwise unattainable weather intelligence.

Our mission is to eliminate weather uncertainty and, in the process, help humanity adapt to climate change, whether that be predicting hurricanes or speeding the adoption of renewables. We are building a future in which the planet is instrumented by thousands of our microballoons, eliminating gaps in our understanding of the planet and giving people and businesses the information they need to make critical decisions.

The Constellation Team keeps our fleet flying and decides where it goes. Day to day, most of our work centers on the 1% of edge cases—the novel, the weird, the unpredictable—and serves two functions: it’s a testing ground where edge cases surface bugs and validate new capabilities, and it’s forward-deployed customer work where new features get demoed to and studied directly with customers in a hands-on way.

About the Role

We’re hiring someone to make sure that all the things we learn from our weird edge-case explorations stick.

As an early-stage startup, we can carry out one-off projects to explore new possibilities and push the bounds on what our technology and operations are capable of. As we scale, we need someone to lead the charge on turning that energy into durable progress. We want quick fixes to become validated capabilities, and customer demos to become repeatable workflows.

You’ll be the person who knows the state of everything. At our scale, projects span hardware, software, manufacturing, and field deployment, and things move fast enough that good work gets dropped. Your job is to track every commitment across the organization, triage what matters against whatever’s on fire, drive each thing to completion, and document it so it survives the next crisis and the next hire.

What You’ll Do

• Run project tracking for every project across the organization, so anyone can see what’s in flight, who owns it, and whether it’s on schedule.

• Brief the Head of Constellation on project status and deadlines; turn direction into tracked owners and milestones.

• Run the weekly performance meetings: capture action items per person across parallel workstreams, set deadlines, and follow up until they close.

• Know whether we’re meeting our obligations—contracts, external deliverables, and internal shipments across the operational stack (manufacturing, launch, flight, constellation), where we’re often our own customer.

• Coordinate who needs what and when when one internal team builds for another or for an exercise.

• Turn flight data into clear statistics on balloon performance and what’s driving failures.

• Protect the important-but-not-urgent work (postmortems, process fixes) that gets buried when everything’s on fire.

What We’re Looking For

• You’re 1 to 10, not 0 to 1. You turn one-off prototypes into consistent processes and systems.

• You follow up relentlessly and warmly. People accept accountability from you because you’re reliable, direct, and invested in their success.

• You finish things, and you make them durable. A loose end bothers you until it’s closed. There are a lot of balls in the air at any time—you’re someone who will track each one, drive it to completion, and write documentation to ensure it endures.

• You’re genuinely curious about how the world works. The job involves balloons, atmospheric science, radio, airspace, and defense tech. You don’t need a background in any of these, but you should find them interesting enough to want to learn. You don’t have to do technical work, but you have the background and fluency to understand the nuances of deeply technical projects.

• You’re comfortable with uncertainty and shifting priorities. Procedures evolve, hardware changes, customers reprioritize. The trap for someone who loves structure is getting frustrated when nothing stays still; we’re looking for someone who will keep things on track even as they’re constantly shifting.

• You’ll tell us when we’re wrong.

Salary

$110,000–$150,000

We are considering a range of backgrounds and experience levels for this position and will adjust our offers accordingly to remain competitive with market rates.

Location

1600 Bridge Parkway, Redwood Shores, CA. In-person required.

Eligibility

Due to the sensitive nature of some of our work, this position is restricted to American citizens only.