Skydio is seeking a Strategic Telecom Alliance Manager to spearhead collaborations with leading telecom providers, ensuring that our drones can operate wherever customers need them. The role involves developing and implementing strategies for engaging with telecom carriers, negotiating agreements, building business models for in-flight data access, setting certification priorities, and building field relationships. This is an office-based position requiring 5 days/week onsite at the HQ in San Mateo, CA.

Responsibilities

Develop and implement our strategy for engaging with telecom carriers that both deepens our existing relationships and expands our ecosystem to new partners within the US, North America, and internationally over time.
Understand our customers’ needs and negotiate agreements with telecom carriers that serve those needs by enabling network access, providing sufficient data connectivity, and building sustainable business partnerships.
Understanding and advocating for our customers in-flight data connectivity by providing simple and easy-to-use connectivity options from the first boot of a drone after it is taken out of the box.
Build the business models that support in-flight data access, and monitor usage and costs to validate those models in practice.
Set regulatory and telecom carrier certification priorities to ensure that our drones meet certification standards for both regulators and telecom operators.
Build field relationships between telecom partners and Skydio’s field team to support major events such as sports games, parades, and other major public gatherings.
Assist Skydio mission success in supporting customers and major incidents.

Requirements

You have a demonstrated track record of translating customer needs into priorities and driving implementation. This can take many forms, including working with complex implementation projects directly with customers, building products from scratch, or building complex business relationships.
You face complexity without fear. When given a goal and a complex process with lots of moving parts, you can break down the challenge into meaningful steps, and clearly communicate how each of them moves the ball forward – whether the process is a technical program like device certification, or a business process like negotiating a telecom contract
You bring strong analytical skills to problems, and once you develop a plan, you can communicate it throughout both Skydio and our partner organizations. Working with multiple complex projects and overlapping deadlines does not scare you.
You have a technical background, demonstrated by either an engineering or technical degree (such as computer science, telecommunications, or a scientific field), and/or work experience managing complex technical requirements.

Nice to have

Prior work at a growth-stage start-up. Skydio is growing fast enough that you’ll need to know when to use an existing rule book, as well as when you should burn the existing rule book and write a new one.
Interest or experience in wireless communication. You don’t need to be an expert with a patent portfolio, but you will need to be familiar with bit rates, quality of service, and large-scale network operations. If you don’t come in with this knowledge, you just need to demonstrate that you can learn it quickly.
Experience with telecommunications. We are flexible about what this means. You might have worked directly at a telecom company (AT&T, Verizon, or T-Mobile), or at one of its major suppliers (like Cisco, Nokia, or Ericsson). What’s important is that you’re interested in carrier network infrastructure and protocols, and how to apply them to new solutions.
Familiarity or interest in how to apply new 5G features, such as dynamic slicing, high-reliability and low-latency communications, and radio resource management, for airborne devices.