Strategic Finance Manager, Manufacturing

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

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!