Head of Partnerships

Harper•San Francisco, CA

3d•$190,000 - $260,000•Onsite

About The Position

Harper is an AI-native commercial insurance company in San Francisco. We're not bolting AI onto insurance — we're rebuilding the entire business as software, on a simple bet: turning expert human judgment into compute is one of the largest transitions left to make, and a trillion-dollar industry still run 90% by hand is the place to prove it. We've grown ~100x in the last year and we move at that speed — on-site, in person, long days, very high standards. Almost no one joins Harper for insurance; they join to build the company that replaces how it works. The Role Harper turns small-business owners into covered customers at volume, with AI doing the heavy lifting behind the human who closes. We've grown ~100x in a year. The constraint isn't demand. It's getting in front of the right business at the moment buying insurance stops being optional. That's where this role lives. You'll build distribution at forcing mechanisms: the regulators, lenders, landlords, franchisors, and trusted advisors who make coverage non-optional for a business. Whoever owns that moment owns the highest-intent customer in the market, and your job is to plug Harper into them and turn each one into a channel that compounds. This is the playbook behind the best distribution businesses (payments networks, commerce platforms, marketplaces): find the installed base, mandate, or transaction moment that carries a product to the customer exactly when they need it. You don't need an insurance background to see the shape of it. You need to have built distribution somewhere. It's a founding-leader seat reporting to the CEO, in growth and biz-ops, not marketing or pure sales. You start hands-on and earn a team by proving the motion.

Requirements

A track record building distribution, channel, or platform partnerships that drove attributable revenue, at a payments, commerce, fintech, marketplace, or platform company (or somewhere equally complex).
You've personally closed and structured partner deals, not just managed a team that did.
Comfort with low-margin, high-volume unit economics.
Based in SF or willing to relocate; on-site, with travel to partner markets.

Nice To Haves

Insurance, insurtech, or other regulated-distribution experience (useful, never required).
Embedded or API distribution, developer/ISV ecosystems, or marketplace app stores.
Channel or reseller program design.
A regulated launch navigated with counsel.

Responsibilities

Close the first marquee partners yourself, structure the economics, and write the playbook from live deals.
Decide which channels to build and in what order, and say no to the rest.
Build the attribution, payouts, and contracts so every partner-sourced dollar is tracked.
Route every referral to a named owner with a tracked outcome.
Design partner economics counsel can clear before launch, and keep the regulated path fast.
Own the scoreboard: partner-sourced conversion, revenue per partner, time-to-first-referral, reviewed weekly with the CEO.
Hire an execution lead and build the team once the motion is proven.