Strategic Partnerships Manager, Retail

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 building the future of delivery, and as a Strategic Partnerships Manager, Retail, you will ensure that our technology delivers incredible outcomes for our most important retail partners.

In this role, you will own the relationship for a focused portfolio of Zipline’s most strategic retail partners. You will be directly responsible for launching, managing, and growing these partnerships as Zipline scales, serving as the face of Zipline to partner stakeholders across executive, commercial, product, operations, marketing, and field teams. You will develop a deep understanding of each partner’s business model, operating priorities, customer experience goals, and internal decision-making dynamics so that Zipline can help them transform delivery for their customers.

This is not a high-volume account management role; success requires deep ownership of a focused set of strategic retail partners. This role requires strong executive communication, analytical rigor, and excellent stakeholder management. Retail partnerships are highly cross-functional and often involve many stakeholders with different goals, even within the same organization. You should be comfortable navigating ambiguity, building trust, creating clarity, and driving decisions in complex environments. You will turn partner priorities into expansion plans, operating rhythms, executive-ready materials, performance insights, and cross-functional workstreams that help Zipline and our partners grow together.

Our ideal candidate is customer obsessed, highly analytical, politically astute, and action oriented. You should be able to move fluidly between data analysis, partner strategy, executive presentations, operational problem-solving, and white-glove partner service.

What You'll Do

• Own strategic retail partner relationships from launch through growth, expansion, and ongoing performance management.
• Collaborate with retail partners to understand their business objectives, customer experience goals, operational constraints, and internal stakeholder priorities.
• Build trusted relationships across partner organizations, including senior executives, commercial leaders, product teams, operations teams, marketing teams, and field stakeholders.
• Develop expansion plans across markets, partner locations, delivery use cases, customer segments, and operating models.
• Work cross-functionally with Zipline Operations, Product, Engineering, Legal, Finance, Marketing, Support, and other teams to launch and expand service for retail partners.
• Establish and track key success metrics, monitor partner performance, identify risks and opportunities, and drive continuous improvement.
• Create executive-ready presentations, business reviews, briefing materials, launch updates, performance analyses, and recommendation memos.
• Lead regular partner touchpoints, quarterly business reviews, executive briefings, launch readouts, and internal alignment meetings.
• Provide white-glove service to strategic partners while maintaining clear expectations, priorities, and accountability on both sides.
• Gather partner insights, analyze data, and surface relevant findings to identify growth opportunities and influence Zipline’s product roadmap.
• Navigate complex stakeholder environments where different teams may have competing goals, timelines, or definitions of success.
• Translate ambiguous partner needs into clear internal plans, owners, next steps, and decision points.
• Advocate for partner needs while balancing Zipline’s operational, product, financial, and strategic priorities.

What You'll Bring

• 5+ years of experience in partnerships, partner success, business development, customer success, strategy, operations, consulting, or a related function.
• Experience owning and growing complex strategic partnerships, ideally with large retail, marketplace, logistics, consumer technology, or enterprise partners.
• Proven ability to manage high-value, highly customized partnerships for a complex system, product, or service.
• Strong executive presence, with experience building and delivering clear, compelling presentations for senior audiences.
• Excellent analytical judgment; able to use data to diagnose performance, identify opportunities, prioritize work, and make recommendations.
• Demonstrated success driving cross-functional alignment and accountability across senior internal and external stakeholders.
• Ability to quickly build trust through authenticity, direct communication, responsiveness, and strong customer empathy.
• Strong commercial judgment and the ability to balance partner needs with company priorities.
• Highly organized and able to manage many workstreams, stakeholders, deadlines, and open questions at once.
• Comfort operating in ambiguous, fast-changing, and politically complex environments.
• Strong written communication skills, especially for executive updates, strategic plans, business reviews, and decision documents.
• Ownership mindset, bias toward action, and commitment to continuous improvement.
• Intellectual curiosity and excitement about transforming the future of logistics.

What Else You Need To Know

This role is an in-person opportunity located out of Zipline’s South San Francisco, CA HQ. We are open to relocation.

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.