Senior Strategic Partnerships Manager
The Athletic
full-time
Posted on:
Location Type: Remote
Location: New York • United States
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Salary
💰 $90,000 - $100,000 per year
Job Level
About the role
- Manage the day to day relationships with The Athletic’s sports league partners.
- Own operational execution of league partnerships, with a focus on video, highlights, and emerging content formats.
- Build trusted, long-term partnership relationships through clear communication, strategic planning, and proactive problem-solving.
- Lead regular partner check-ins, performance reviews, and recaps.
- Translate league agreements and content rights into clear internal guidelines for video, editorial, social, and product teams.
- Partner closely with Legal to ensure compliance with league rules, usage rights, approvals, embargoes, and attribution requirements.
- Internally advocate for league partners to ensure contractual obligations and brand standards are met.
- Monitor and evaluate partnership success against agreed KPIs.
- Develop strong partner relationships, through effectively communicating complex ideas and strategies, leading meetings, crafting partner correspondence, driving campaign production and evaluating partnership success.
- Identify process improvements to scale partnership operations efficiently.
- Collaborate with the broader Business Development team, Strategy and Planning teams to identify new opportunities to expand league partnerships and unlock incremental revenue.
- Serve as the primary point of contact between internal cross-functional teams including legal, finance, product, editorial, design and marketing to ensure all deliverables are on message, on track, and within scope.
- Build and maintain project delivery trackers and create proof of delivery documents/recaps.
Requirements
- BA/BS degree with 5-7 years of relevant business development and partnership management experience.
- Experience in working with professional sports leagues, teams, and properties is a must.
- Strong understanding of media rights, content licensing, and video/highlights workflows.
- Strong understanding of news and the journalistic process.
- Experience in managing large-scale, multi-vertical partnerships.
- Proficiency in developing project plans, process maps, and project tracking.
- Experience managing advertising production workflows and teams while also direct client exposure.
- High level of professionalism; driven and motivated with excellent follow-up.
- Outstanding interpersonal and communication skills (both written and verbal).
- Extremely organized.
- Creative and strategic thinking skills.
- Ability to multitask and meet deadlines in a fast-paced environment with colleagues based in New York, San Francisco, around North America, and internationally.
- Represent The Athletic brand well.
Benefits
- Highly competitive, employer-contributed medical, dental, vision, basic life and disability insurance plans.
- Savings accounts for medical, wellness, and childcare expenses.
- 401k retirement savings plan and employer match.
- Paid time off including paid sick leave, 12 paid holidays, 15 days of accrued vacation to start, and up to 20 weeks of Paid Parental Leave.
- Our global benefits packages offer similar benefits and perks, competitive to the local market.
Applicant Tracking System Keywords
Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.
Hard skills
business developmentpartnership managementmedia rightscontent licensingvideo workflowsproject plansprocess mapsproject trackingadvertising production workflows
Soft skills
communication skillsinterpersonal skillsorganizational skillsstrategic thinkingproblem-solvingmultitaskingprofessionalismmotivationfollow-up