Senior Partnerships Manager

Overview:

• Start date: ASAP
• Reporting to: Director of Partnerships
• Visa sponsorship: UK citizen or visa-holder preferred, but not a dealbreaker.
• Background checks: Due to the nature of the work we do with global governments and partners, all employees need to pass background checks, verifying your identity, education (if relevant), work history, sanctions, criminal record, adverse financial history and right to work.
• You can expect to hear from us, no matter the outcome, by: 24th October 2025
• Salary expectations: We aim for transparency on salary bands. If our range is misaligned with your expectations, we'd welcome an open conversation as early as possible.

Role

Apolitical is scaling our partnerships with global governments (e.g. UK FCDO, Estonia Ministry of Justice and Digital Affairs, Brazil ENAP), foundations (e.g. Rockefeller Foundation, Bezos Earth Fund), and corporates (e.g. Google.org). We're hiring a Senior Partnerships Manager to ensure world-class delivery on a set of strategic accounts and to set the standard for excellence across our partnerships team.

In this role, you'll steward some of Apolitical's most important global relationships: translating complex contracts into actionable plans, coordinating delivery across internal teams, and navigating senior stakeholder conversations with confidence. You'll also channel insights from our partners back into product, growth, and data - helping Apolitical sharpen its strategy and scale impact.

Success will be measured by partner satisfaction, renewals and expansions, and the improvements you embed into how we deliver partnerships across the company.

Tasks and remit

You'll spend your time across three main areas:

• Delivery: Own end-to-end account management on high-value partnerships, ensuring exceptional delivery and strong partner relationships.
• Evaluation and sales support: Oversee data and evaluation reports, and provide inputs into resell, upsell, and referral opportunities.
• Cross-company learning: Feed insights from delivery back into processes and product development.

What you will be doing:

• Translating complex contracts into delivery milestones
• Coordinating multi-team projects with professionalism and rigour
• Building strong partner relationships and navigating challenging conversations
• Sharing insights that shape our company's strategy and processes.

What you won't be doing:

• Working in isolation; this role requires cross-team collaboration
• Following a rigid playbook; you'll be expected to improve how we deliver as you go

Role expectations

Within one month, you will

• Take ownership of one or more enterprise partnerships in delivery
• Build trust with your counterparties in partner teams
• Familiarise yourself with our internal systems for delivery and evaluation.

Within three months, you will

• Support end-to-end delivery on major projects, coordinating across multiple teams
• Develop account plans for your key accounts
• Identify ways to optimise delivery processes.

Within six to nine months, you will

• Contribute to account renewals, upsells, and referrals
• Embed improvements into delivery processes used across the team

About you

This is a great fit if you

• Excel at building strong, trusting relationships with senior stakeholders
• Love making complex, multi-stakeholder projects run smoothly
• Are hands-on in solving problems and thrive on accountability
• Want to shape delivery processes that others in the team can benefit from
• Are comfortable working with data and evaluation to evidence impact
• Care deeply about Apolitical's mission and the impact of government

This likely won't be the right role if you

• Prefer working in narrow functional silos, as this role requires constant collaboration
• Want a fixed playbook. Our processes are evolving, and you'll be expected to shape and improve them.
• Are uncomfortable with ambiguity, as you'll often need to create clarity from complex or shifting priorities.

Don't meet every single expectation? Studies have shown that women and people of colour are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. Apolitical is dedicated to building a diverse and inclusive workplace, so if you're excited about this role but your past experience doesn't align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

Application Process

Apolitical uses Applied in our recruitment. Applied aims to overcome unconscious bias in recruiting. Instead of using your CV alone, we'll be asking you to answer questions to test skills needed for the role. The answers are then anonymised, and reviewed in a random order by members of our team.

The Applied platform also asks some demographic questions before you start your application. These answers are never visible to the hiring team and don't affect your application in any way. We only see summary statistics to help us check if our candidate pool is balanced and if everyone has an equal chance to get hired irrespective of their background. If you prefer, you can easily opt out of answering these questions.

Using AI in your application answers

At Apolitical, we embrace new technologies and encourage the use of AI in our work. However, as AI becomes more prevalent, it can be difficult to distinguish between machine-generated content and the unique perspectives of candidates. We're excited to see how you use AI tools to structure and refine your answers, but we value your unique insights above all else. Ensure your application reflects your voice and how your skills align with our mission.