Strategic Partnerships Lead

The shape of it

In the posting’s own words

You will report to the Head of Strategic Partnerships and own a named set of partners that includes hyperscalers, frontier AI labs, silicon vendors, and commerce and enterprise software platforms. The work takes a different shape with each one, but the common thread is that these partnerships live close to the product: embedding Vercel inside a partner's platform, co-building new products, taking a joint offering to enterprises that neither company could sell alone. Structuring a deal means both understanding the technical components well enough to know what a partnership makes possible and understanding what the business impact could be if done successfully.

What it asks for · 8

• 8+ years developing, negotiating, and executing complex commercial agreements, ideally at a platform, infrastructure, cloud, or developer tools company
• A track record of initiating partnerships that had no precedent, with companies significantly larger than your own. You can walk through the terms you won and the ones you gave up
• Experience structuring deals with significant technical surface area: platform integrations, embedded or whitelabeled product, licensing, infrastructure and compute commitments. You can hold a credible conversation with a partner's product and engineering teams about agents, inference, model routing, and cloud infrastructure
• Experience creating and driving strategy, and getting an organization to fund it
• Comfortable leading cross-functional teams you do not manage, through Product, Engineering, Legal, Finance, and Sales
• Strong agency and comfort with ambiguity. You decide what to work on and can defend the choice
• Speed. You move quickly and decisively, and you keep large deals from stalling
• Excellent written and verbal communication with executives on both sides of the table

Also a plus

• Have done partnerships at or with a hyperscaler, a frontier AI lab, or a large commerce or enterprise software platform
• Have structured technology licensing, OEM, or embedded distribution agreements
• Started in a technical role (engineering, solutions architecture, or technical product) before moving into commercial work

What the job covers

• Own a named set of strategic partners end to end, from first conversation through signed agreement to launch and growth
• Identify and develop new partnerships with the companies that matter most to Vercel's strategy across AI, cloud, commerce, and enterprise software
• Build the business case: size the opportunity, scope the product and engineering investment it requires, and give leadership a clear recommendation, including when the recommendation is to pass
• Lead negotiations end to end, structuring commercial agreements that are new to Vercel and often new to the partner: revenue share, embedded pricing, co-sell commitments, marketplace terms
• Develop senior relationships on the partner side and bring Vercel executives in where the relationship calls for it
• Lead cross-functional teams across Product, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Finance, and Legal to take a signed agreement to launch
• Advise Vercel leadership on where the ecosystem is moving and what it means for our roadmap
• Run deals with structure: clear milestones, agreed measures of success on both sides, and the judgment to stop the ones that are not working

Tools and skills named

Words the posting leans on

• partnerships10×
• product10×
• partner7×
• engineering6×
• platform6×
• agreements5×
• deals5×
• technical5×
• commercial4×
• cross-functional4×
• end4×
• cloud3×
• commerce3×
• develop3×
• done3×
• embedded3×

Counted from the posting after the mission statement and the legal notices are set aside. The ones near the top are the ones a screener is looking for.

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