Senior Manager Slack Technical Business Development

Salesforce•San Francisco, CA

4d•$172,500 - $285,800•Hybrid

About The Position

Salesforce is seeking an experienced Senior Business Development Manager to recruit, onboard, and manage strategic partners across Slack’s platform ecosystem. This role operates at the intersection of product, partnerships, and commercial strategy, focusing on helping partners build on Slack and driving adoption through established partnership frameworks. It is a high-visibility, individual contributor role within a centralized team dedicated to developing partnership initiatives aligned with Slack’s top platform and product priorities. The ideal candidate possesses strong commercial instincts, a genuine curiosity about platform value creation, and a proactive approach to building new initiatives.

Requirements

7+ years in business development, strategic partnerships, or platform strategy, ideally in SaaS, AI, developer platforms, or cloud ecosystems.
Proven experience recruiting partners into platform or ecosystem programs and managing those relationships through activation and scale.
Strong product sensibility and comfort with the technical feasibility of partner integrations, including APIs, workflows, agents, and automation.
Familiarity with generative AI, LLMs, MCP (Model Context Protocol), agent frameworks, and the broader AI infrastructure landscape.
An entrepreneurial spirit with a record of sourcing, developing, and maintaining partner relationships in fast-moving markets.
Strong commercial instincts combined with the ability to work effectively across technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Exceptional presentation and communication skills, including business case development and partner storytelling.
Ability to structure and analyze the quantitative impact of partnerships on the business.
In-depth experience operating within and leading cross-functional teams (product, engineering, customer success, legal, finance, marketing).
Passion about Slack, our platform, and the role of AI in transforming how teams work.

Nice To Haves

Background in product, customer support, or developer tool software partnerships.
Experience with marketplace or app store business models.
Prior work at a platform company or in a platform-adjacent BD role.

Responsibilities

Drive adoption of Slack’s platform among companies offering software products and services, with a focus on AI agents, MCP, and automation ecosystems.
Recruit and onboard strategic partners who extend Slack through integrations, connectors, workflows, and data connectivity, managing internal alignment and partner readiness.
Identify platform gaps and develop partner-driven solutions, including partnerships that enhance intelligent agent workflows and in-context AI capabilities.
Develop mutually beneficial, trusting relationships with partners to make Slack a favored company for partnerships.
Recruit and manage partners across the AI and data stack, including LLM providers, agent platforms, analytics tools, and infrastructure enablers, into Slack’s ecosystem programs.
Champion creative business models (e.g., capacity-based pricing, embedded experiences, ecosystem monetization) for mutual partner and customer success.
Support the development of monetization and distribution models for Slack’s MCP ecosystem, AgentExchange, and “Add to Slack” deployment pathways.
Collaborate with product, engineering, and legal teams to ensure partner solutions are technically sound, secure, and strategically aligned.
Own the partner engagement lifecycle: from opportunity identification and outreach through onboarding, activation, and GTM readiness.
Navigate ambiguity, prioritize effectively, and move quickly to onboard new partners in the evolving AI landscape.
Execute go-to-market plans that demonstrate a compelling value proposition for both Slack and its partners.
Ensure partner engagements are scalable and built for long-term success, focusing on recruiting new partners and driving activation.
Partner with stakeholders across Slack product, platform engineering, AI, AppExchange, AgentExchange, and GTM teams to align on roadmap gaps and ecosystem leverage points.
Communicate market opportunities, trends, partner feedback, and competitive intelligence to cross-functional teams.
Act as a thought leader on the AI partner landscape and its implications for Slack’s platform strategy.
Contribute to strategy sessions, internal readouts, and investment cases with insight and clarity.