Senior Associate, Local Partnerships & Activation

Responsibilities

• Own Local Business Partnerships
• Independently identify and prioritize high-quality restaurants, cafés, bars, local attractions, lifestyle venues, and other local businesses across the SF Bay Area.
• Own outreach and relationship development with business owners, operators, managers, and local decision-makers, and negotiate mutually beneficial collaboration opportunities.
• Maintain partner lists, outreach records, follow-up notes, and partnership status updates.
• Drive Co-Marketing and Local Campaigns
• Develop and execute co-marketing opportunities such as restaurant features, local guides, check-in campaigns, tasting experiences, special offers, neighborhood lists, and event collaborations.
• Help local partners understand how Wanderboat can support visibility, discovery, customer engagement, and brand exposure.
• Coordinate with internal product, content, growth, and marketing teams to help turn partner opportunities into user-facing experiences.
• Execute Local Activations
• Own the planning and execution of local activation campaigns across the SF Bay Area, including dining experiences, restaurant check-ins, neighborhood crawls, tasting events, creator meetups, and local discovery activities.

Requirements

• 3+ years of experience in local partnerships, business development, merchant partnerships, account management, field marketing, community activation, or local growth.
• Experience working with restaurants, local businesses, merchants, venues, creators, or community-based partners.
• Strong communication and relationship-building skills, with comfort talking directly to business owners, operators, and local decision-makers.
• Experience leading local events, offline activations, co-marketing campaigns, merchant campaigns, or community-based growth initiatives.
• Demonstrated ability to independently manage partnership pipelines, negotiate collaboration terms, and drive projects from initial outreach through execution and post-campaign evaluation.
• Strong execution and organizational skills, with the ability to manage outreach lists, follow-ups, calendars, and activity summaries.
• Comfortable being field-facing and spending time in the local market across the SF Bay Area.
• Strong interest in food, restaurants, local discovery, travel, lifestyle experiences, city exploration, and consumer products.
• Comfortable working in a fast-moving early-stage startup environment.

Preferred

• Experience at or working with platforms such as Uber Eats, DoorDash, Yelp, OpenTable, Resy, Tock, Toast, Square, Tripadvisor, Google Maps, or other local commerce / local discovery platforms.
• Existing relationships with restaurants, cafés, bars, local venues, creators, food communities, neighborhood organizations, or lifestyle businesses in the SF Bay Area.
• Experience supporting merchant partnership programs, local business campaigns, creator collaborations, or UGC-driven campaigns.
• Experience using CRM, pipeline management, or partner tracking tools such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Airtable, Notion, or Google Sheets.
• Familiarity with local food trends, dining culture, neighborhood discovery, and consumer behavior in the Bay Area.

Benefits

• Backed by top investors, with a team including former builders from Microsoft AI, Meta, and Google.
• Opportunity to help shape how people discover restaurants, local businesses, and city experiences in the AI era.
• High ownership and direct impact on local growth, business partnerships, and real-world activation.
• Work on a product that connects AI-powered discovery with real-world dining, lifestyle, and local exploration.
• Help build the foundation for a scalable local partnership and activation model from the ground up.