Strategic Partnerships Manager, Retail

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.

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.

• 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,