Strategic Partnerships Lead - Cloud

Applied Compute•San Francisco, CA

1d•Onsite

About The Position

The Strategic Partnerships Lead - Cloud will build and operate the partner ecosystem that extends Applied Compute’s ability to win. This hands-on role focuses on sourcing, structuring, negotiating, and operating partnerships with cloud providers and other large counterparties. The role owns each partnership from the first conversation through agreement and ongoing results, including its structure, economics, and business impact. The position works closely with sales, product, and leadership to determine which partners to pursue, establish those relationships, and turn them into pipeline, capacity, and revenue as the company grows. The role is based in San Francisco, with work from the company’s Mission office.

Requirements

Prior professional experience in strategic partnerships, alliances, or business development at an AI lab, cloud provider, infrastructure company, or enterprise software company, with a track record of closed partnerships that produced measurable revenue.
Experience structuring and negotiating complex commercial agreements, including co-sell, resale, referral, marketplace, and capacity arrangements.
Existing relationships with partner, alliances, and business development teams at hyperscalers.
Enough technical depth to engage confidently in conversations about model training, inference, and infrastructure, and to work directly with engineers on integrations.
Strong commercial judgment, including the ability to identify partnerships that will move the business, decline others, and structure deals that work for both sides.

Nice To Haves

Experience building a partner or channel program from scratch at an early-stage company.
Familiarity with hyperscaler marketplace programs, co-sell incentives, and partner-funded programs.
Experience working with systems integrators on enterprise AI deployments.

Responsibilities

Source, structure, and close partnerships with hyperscalers and other large strategic counterparties.
Negotiate commercial terms, co-sell motions, marketplace listings, and capacity arrangements.
Run co-selling, co-marketing, and account-mapping motions to convert partner relationships into qualified opportunities, working those opportunities alongside account executives.
Build the agreements, enablement materials, and tracking needed to make partnerships repeatable as the ecosystem grows.
Manage ongoing relationships with executive sponsors and day-to-day counterparts at each partner.
Measure partner-sourced and partner-influenced pipeline, revenue, and capacity, and use results to guide partnership investment and new partnership choices.