Drone Delivery Startup Manna to Add 1,000 Jobs at a New Tulsa Factory

Drone delivery is about to become a real source of paychecks in Oklahoma. According to TechCrunch, the Irish autonomous delivery company Manna is building a US operations and manufacturing center in Tulsa that is expected to create more than 1,000 jobs over the next three years. The roles span manufacturing, maintenance, flight operations, customer support and business functions, and the first wave of operational hiring is already underway. At Metaintro, we track where new jobs are actually landing, and in a frozen 2026 market this is one of the rare good-news hiring stories worth acting on. Here is what Manna is building in Tulsa, who it wants to hire, and how to position yourself for one of these roles.

What Is Manna Actually Building in Tulsa?

Manna was founded in Ireland in 2019 and runs a delivery-as-a-service model, sending small autonomous drones to homes and lowering packages on a tether instead of landing. The company says it has completed close to 380,000 deliveries of groceries, pharmacy items and restaurant meals to date, often in under three minutes, which makes it one of the busiest drone delivery networks in the world.

Tulsa is the centerpiece of its US strategy. Manna is moving manufacturing out of Dublin and into a full-scale Oklahoma facility, and per TechCrunch construction is already underway, with production expected to begin in about a year. The company plans to deliver groceries, pharmaceuticals and everyday essentials across the Tulsa metro, its first full-scale US city after operating in the Dallas-Fort Worth area since 2023. Building drones in Oklahoma rather than shipping them from Dublin also shortens Manna's supply chain and puts assembly, testing and repair under one roof, which is the kind of vertically integrated operation that tends to generate steady, long-term employment rather than a short construction burst. For a job seeker that is a quiet positive, because it means the company needs people across the entire product lifecycle in one place, from the workers who assemble airframes to the technicians who keep them flying after thousands of trips. Manna is chasing the same last-mile market as Zipline, Amazon Prime Air and Alphabet's Wing, which tells you this is a well-funded race rather than a science experiment. For job seekers, a physical factory plus a live delivery operation means a wide mix of roles, not just a handful of engineers. It mirrors the way a new humanoid robot factory reshapes local hiring when advanced manufacturing lands in a mid-sized city.

How Many Jobs Will the Tulsa Factory Create, and When?

The headline number is more than 1,000 jobs over three years, and Oklahoma officials are treating it as a marquee win. Governor Kevin Stitt called the project more than 1,000 good-paying jobs that put the state at the forefront of the future of aviation, according to sUAS News. Founder Bobby Healy framed America as the world's largest opportunity for drone delivery and pledged to create those jobs over the next three years.

Timing matters more than the total if you are job hunting right now. Manna is focused first on scaling an operations team to roughly 200 to 300 people within 12 months while the factory is still going up, with manufacturing roles arriving once production starts in about a year. It helps to understand why the operations team comes first. Before a single package flies, Manna needs people to map delivery zones, coordinate with local authorities, run customer onboarding and staff the dispatch and support desks that keep a live network moving safely. Those functions do not depend on the factory being finished, which is why they are the roles most likely to be posted in the coming months, and why anyone who can show they have run operations, logistics or customer-facing teams under pressure fits the exact profile Manna needs during this first phase. The company has also said hiring will accelerate or slow depending on how quickly it enters the six other US cities it is assessing, with those launches potentially starting by the end of 2027. That phasing puts Manna in the same league of concrete hiring commitments as Micron's multibillion-dollar plant adding thousands of jobs and United's plan to hire 5,000 workers around a major hub investment. The practical takeaway is simple. If you want in early, target the operational and commercial roles now, because the assembly floor comes later.

What Kinds of Roles Will Manna Be Hiring For?

Manna has said the 1,000-plus jobs will span aviation and flight operations, commercial operations, customer support, manufacturing, maintenance and business functions. In plain terms, that covers remote drone operators and flight coordinators, avionics and airframe maintenance technicians, assembly and production workers on the manufacturing side, customer support and dispatch staff, and the commercial, finance and people roles every scaling company needs. It is worth breaking those categories down further, because each one maps to a different background. Flight operations roles suit people from aviation, logistics, air traffic support or even simulation-heavy fields who are comfortable monitoring several aircraft on a screen at once. Maintenance and avionics roles favor anyone who has worked on aircraft, cars, industrial machinery or electronics, since the core skill is diagnosing and fixing complex mechanical and electrical systems under time pressure. Manufacturing roles reward reliability, attention to detail and a willingness to learn assembly processes, which makes them accessible to workers coming from warehousing, automotive plants or other production lines. Customer support and commercial roles, meanwhile, look for communication skills and the confidence to represent a brand new service to cautious first-time users.

The encouraging part for job seekers is how many of these paths do not require a four-year degree. Remote pilots who hold an FAA Part 107 certificate typically earn somewhere in the $55,000 to $130,000 range, with a median near $83,000 for full-time operators, and maintenance and manufacturing roles reward hands-on mechatronics and electronics skills over academic credentials. That fits a wider 2026 pattern in which skilled trades workers hold real leverage in a tight hiring crunch and where buying or building a trades-based career has become a legitimate wealth play. If you already work in aviation maintenance, warehouse logistics or advanced manufacturing, much of your experience transfers directly. If you are starting fresh, a Part 107 certificate, a technical certificate in mechatronics, or a maintenance apprenticeship are the fastest on-ramps. The career lesson here is to map your existing skills to a named role and pursue the specific credential that unlocks it rather than waiting for a generic opening to appear.

Why Did an Irish Drone Company Choose Tulsa?

Tulsa has spent years engineering itself into exactly this kind of landing spot, and Manna's decision is the payoff. The city is a federally designated Tech Hub with a dedicated autonomy testbed, and the deal pulled in a deep bench of local partners including Tulsa Innovation Labs, PartnerTulsa, the Tulsa Regional Chamber, Tulsa Local Ventures backed by the George Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Oklahoma Department of Commerce, as detailed by sUAS News. That ecosystem, plus lower operating costs than the coasts and available airspace for beyond-visual-line-of-sight flights, made the Oklahoma pitch hard to beat.

The move also reflects a bigger shift in where American jobs are being created. Advanced manufacturing and infrastructure work are increasingly flowing to mid-sized inland cities rather than expensive tech hubs, part of a US labor market splitting between AI-hit office roles and hands-on hiring. It rhymes with the way data center construction is creating more building jobs than there are workers to fill them. There is a lesson here even for workers who never plan to set foot in Oklahoma. The factors that pulled Manna to Tulsa, lower costs, supportive local government, available space and a coordinated economic-development push, are the same factors drawing other advanced employers to overlooked cities across the country, so tracking which mid-sized metros are courting automation, aviation and manufacturing firms can tell you where the next hiring waves will land before they make national headlines. Manna has also stacked its bench with aviation heavyweights, hiring former Ryanair marketing chief Kenny Jacobs as executive chair and president, a signal that it intends to run Tulsa like a serious aviation operation. For workers, the message is to look beyond the traditional coastal job maps, because the next durable hiring booms are increasingly showing up in places like Tulsa.

What Does Manna's Funding Say About Job Security Here?

A hiring promise is only as good as the money behind it, so the balance sheet matters. Manna closed a $50 million Series B in April 2026, lifting its total raised to roughly $110 million. The round drew notable backers including ARK Invest, the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, Schooner Capital and existing supporters Coca-Cola HBC and Molten Ventures, and the company has talked about standing up as many as 40 operational bases across the US and Europe. Healy has said the technology and unit economics of suburban delivery are proven and that the job now is scale.

That is a genuinely strong position for a startup, but job seekers should stay clear-eyed. It also helps to read what the investor mix signals. A strategic sovereign fund, a well-known growth investor and a global beverage company backing the same startup suggests serious money sees suburban drone delivery as a durable market rather than a passing trend, and companies with that kind of backing tend to hire steadily rather than in one risky burst. Even so, Manna is still a venture-backed company whose hiring pace is explicitly tied to how fast it grows and how regulators treat expanded drone flights, so the 1,000 jobs will arrive in waves rather than all at once. Treat an early Manna role the way you would any high-growth opportunity, by weighing the upside of getting in before scale against the volatility that comes with it. The broader signal is positive, because fresh capital is flowing into physical automation and robotics startups are hiring quickly on record funding. When you evaluate an offer, ask about the funding runway, the hiring roadmap and where your specific role sits in the company's growth plan.

How Secure Are Drone Delivery Jobs Against Automation?

That may sound like an odd question for jobs built on automation, but it is the right one to ask in 2026. The paradox of a company like Manna is that its whole product automates the delivery driver, yet the operation still runs on people. Someone has to build the aircraft, certify them, monitor the flights, service the rotors and batteries, reassure the customer who is nervous about a drone over the backyard and manage the commercial relationships that keep restaurants and pharmacies on the platform. These are jobs created by automation rather than destroyed by it, and they sit close to the physical hardware where human judgment and hands-on skill are hardest to replace.

For workers who have watched software chip away at office roles, moving toward the machines that need maintaining, operating and building is one of the more defensible career pivots available right now. The skills you would pick up at an operation like Manna, aircraft maintenance, systems monitoring, precision assembly and safety-critical troubleshooting, also travel well across the wider drone, aviation and robotics sector, so even if one employer stumbles, the experience keeps its value. That portability is the real prize. A single startup can slow down or change direction, but a certified, hands-on skill set in an expanding hardware field gives you options far beyond any one company, which is exactly the kind of insurance worth building in an uncertain market.

How Does This Fit the Wider Drone and Manufacturing Job Boom?

Manna is one company, but it is riding a fast-growing sector. The US drone market was valued at about $29 billion in 2025 and is projected to roughly double by 2033, and the delivery segment specifically is expanding as regulators open up more beyond-visual-line-of-sight operations. The drone industry group AUVSI has projected that opening US airspace to commercial drones would create around 100,000 US jobs, spanning pilots, technicians, manufacturers and operations staff. That growth curve is why a single funding round can translate into a four-figure hiring commitment in a city like Tulsa.

Zoom out and Manna slots into a wave of physical-economy hiring that is quietly outpacing the headlines about white-collar cuts. The space sector alone now supports more than 373,000 US jobs, reshoring is bringing chip work back through deals like Apple's push for US manufacturing jobs, and advanced-mobility bets such as the Joby and Toyota air taxi partnership are creating US factory jobs. The common thread is that companies building real hardware still need people to assemble, maintain and operate it, and those roles are harder to automate away than a lot of desk work. For anyone worried about AI hollowing out their field, targeting the physical infrastructure of the automation economy is one of the more durable career bets available in 2026.

What Should You Do Now to Land One of These Jobs?

Start by getting close to the source. Watch Manna's own careers channels along with the Tulsa hiring pipelines run by PartnerTulsa and the Oklahoma Department of Commerce, since large employment projects like this often route early openings through local economic-development partners before they hit broad job boards. If you can, set alerts now so you see the operations and commercial roles that Manna is filling first over the next 12 months.

Then build the specific credential your target role needs. For flight operations, an FAA Part 107 remote pilot certificate is the baseline. For maintenance and manufacturing, a mechatronics or avionics certificate, or a maintenance apprenticeship, will move you to the front of the line, and staying ahead of automation with hands-on technical skills is exactly the kind of bet that pays off here. When interviews come, do the homework to win over the employer before your first conversation by learning how tethered drone delivery and Part 107 operations actually work. And once you have an offer, do not leave money on the table. Use proven salary negotiation tactics to benchmark against that $55,000 to $130,000 range for certified operators. If you are open to relocating to Tulsa, say so early, because a willingness to move is a real advantage when a company is standing up an operation from scratch.

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People Also Asked

Q: How many jobs will Manna create in Tulsa?

A: Manna expects to create more than 1,000 jobs in Tulsa over three years, spanning aviation and flight operations, commercial operations, customer support, manufacturing, maintenance and business functions. The company plans to scale an operations team of about 200 to 300 people within the first 12 months while it builds the factory, so the earliest roles are operational and commercial rather than assembly-line positions.

Q: Do you need a degree to work at Manna's drone factory?

A: Many of the roles do not require a four-year degree. Remote drone operators typically need an FAA Part 107 certificate, while maintenance and manufacturing roles reward mechatronics, avionics and hands-on electronics skills that you can gain through technical certificates or apprenticeships. Business, finance and commercial functions may look for degrees, but a large share of the openings are skills-based.

Q: Is Manna a financially stable company to work for?

A: Manna raised a $50 million Series B in April 2026 from investors including ARK Invest and the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, bringing its total funding to about $110 million. That is a strong position for a startup, but hiring will arrive in waves and depends on how quickly the company expands and how regulators treat drone flights, so weigh the early-stage upside against normal startup volatility.

Ready to explore your next move? A hiring wave like Manna's in Tulsa is a reminder that new jobs are being created even in a tight market, and the people who act early tend to win them. At Metaintro, we surface where real openings are opening up so you can get ahead of the crowd. Create your free Metaintro profile to get matched with roles in fast-growing companies and be first in line when the next big employer comes to your city.