Head of Strategic Hardware Partnerships

Gimlet Labs • San Francisco, CA

3d

About The Position

Gimlet Labs is seeking a Head of Strategic Hardware Partnerships to lead high-impact partnership discussions across the hardware, infrastructure, and AI systems ecosystem. This role will manage strategic opportunities, coordinate technical and commercial evaluation processes, and build long-term relationships with partners working on infrastructure acceleration, hardware/software co-design, deployment optimization, and AI systems integration.

The ideal candidate is highly relationship-oriented, technically fluent, and comfortable moving between business, product, engineering, and executive conversations. They should be able to create structure around ambiguous partnership opportunities while helping technical teams evaluate where collaboration can create real value.

Requirements

• 8–15 years in strategic partnerships, business development, or technical alliances within semiconductors, AI infrastructure, or adjacent hardware ecosystems.
• Proven ability to originate and close hardware partnership deals, not just manage existing relationships or inbound opportunities.
• Deep understanding of data center economics, including hardware pricing, allocation, lead times, supply commitments, and competitive dynamics across GPUs, wafer-scale systems, and custom accelerators.
• Experience leading technical partnership processes with engineering teams, including vendor evaluations, POCs, benchmarks, and co-development discussions.
• Credible across technical and commercial conversations, with the ability to engage senior executives, founders, and engineering leaders.
• Experience building a partner motion from scratch at a growth-stage company; comfortable creating structure in ambiguity.

Nice To Haves

• Direct relationships with BD/partnerships teams at leading hardware companies
• Experience with AI inference infrastructure: disaggregated inference, KV cache optimization, prefill/decode separation, hardware/software co-design, or inference model serving at scale.
• Experience managing partnerships with chip vendors, OEMs/ODMs, cloud providers, networking companies, or infrastructure platforms.
• Familiarity with multi-vendor procurement and supply chain diversification strategies
• Experience supporting commercial agreements, joint roadmaps, and co-development programs at a high-growth AI or infrastructure company.

Responsibilities

• Own Gimlet’s strategic relationships across the hardware ecosystem partners including silicon, storage, networking partners
• Serve as Gimlet’s primary commercial counterpart to partner BD, partnerships, and executive teams.
• Build joint partner roadmaps aligned to Gimlet’s deployment timelines, customer commitments, product strategy, and supply needs.
• Identify ecosystem trends, partner capabilities, and collaboration models that improve performance, efficiency, supply access, or deployment outcomes.
• Originate, structure, and negotiate strategic partnership agreements, commercials, and co-development frameworks from first conversation through signature.
• Partner with engineering to run technical evaluations and benchmarks, translating results into commercial positioning, ROI models, vendor selection, and executive recommendations.
• Coordinate across engineering, product, legal, finance, procurement, sales, and executive stakeholders to advance partnerships, support customer deals, and track status, blockers, decision points, and next steps.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed