Vercel Strategic Partnerships Lead at Vercel to develop and manage first-of-a-kind partnerships that drive company growth. Own partnerships with hyperscalers, AI labs, silicon vendors, and software platforms.
Responsibilities
Vercel is hiring a Strategic Product Partnerships Lead to develop first-of-a-kind partnerships that inflect the company's growth. Done well, these partnerships open distribution for our products, create new pipeline for our field teams, and/or add new capabilities to our platform. This is a highly cross-functional and technical role: you will spend as much time with product and engineering leaders as with commercial ones, both with partners and with Vercelians.
We expect candidates to demonstrate significant experience delivering complex deal work, creating and driving strategy, working with cross-functional teams to launch new initiatives, and initiating first-of-a-kind partnerships. We are looking for someone with a strong sense of ownership who performs at a senior level and does their best work with limited direction.
This is a hybrid position, requiring 3 days per week in one of our San Francisco, Austin, or New York City offices.
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
Qualification
8+ years developingSpeedHave structured technology licensing
Required
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
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
