Strategic Partnerships Manager

Shade.inc•New York, NY

2d•$110,000 - $150,000•Onsite

About The Position

Shade is seeking an experienced partnerships lead to join full-time and build its strategic partnerships function from the ground up. This role will work closely with the CEO and GTM leadership. Shade is a fast-growing company that has built technology combining elements of FrameIO and LucidLink, enhanced with proprietary AI for visual search and video labeling. They process thousands of hours of video daily, serving major customers across post-production, creative agencies, sports, and internal media teams. The company is experiencing significant growth (150% QoQ, 120% NRR) and is backed by prominent venture capital firms. Shade aims to build a platform that eliminates tedious aspects of creative work, such as waiting for downloads, manual tagging, and archive sorting, by operating at the file system level to become critical infrastructure for creative teams. This is an opportunity to join a company described as being on the ground floor of the next Cursor or Figma.

Requirements

5-6+ years in Business Development, Partnerships, or a related GTM function.
Experience building partnerships strategy before.
Experience at a high-growth startup helping to establish a partner program where none existed.
Ability to define partnership strategy and goals and build cross-functional alignment without extensive guidance.
Experience leading and negotiating complex, first-of-their-kind partnerships (technical integrations, channel, or platform deals).
Comfortable engaging in product and roadmap discussions.
Credible to represent partner needs to engineering and design.
Skilled in tracking partner performance, identifying trends, and providing data-driven insights and recommendations.
Experience defining processes and comfortable with both strategic (business reviews) and tactical (one-pagers) tasks.
Confident in partner-facing interactions, negotiations, and industry events.
Willingness to work in-person.

Nice To Haves

Experience creating and implementing product or channel partnership strategies in enterprise SaaS.
Experience partnering with companies in the M&E / creative tools ecosystem (Adobe, NLEs, DAM, cloud storage).
Comfortable structuring and negotiating revenue-share or reseller agreements.

Responsibilities

Build the strategic partnerships function from the ground up.
Define partnership strategy and goals.
Build alignment across product, sales, marketing, and leadership to execute partnership strategies.
Lead and negotiate complex, first-of-their-kind partnerships, including technical integrations, channel, or platform deals, from initial conversation to signed agreement.
Engage in product and roadmap conversations and represent partner needs to engineering and design.
Track partner performance, spot trends, and provide clear, regular updates and recommendations to leadership.
Define processes where none currently exist.
Run partner business reviews.
Write one-pagers to get deals prioritized internally.
Represent Shade at partner meetings, negotiations, industry events, and conferences.
Build and lead a team of partner managers as the program scales.