Strategic Product Partnerships Lead

About the role

As a Strategic Product Partnerships Lead, you’ll develop first-of-a-kind partnerships that inflect Vercel’s growth: partnerships that open distribution for our products, create new pipeline for our field teams, and add new capabilities to our platform.

You’ll own a named set of partners spanning hyperscalers, frontier AI labs, silicon vendors, and commerce and enterprise software platforms. These partnerships live close to the product, whether that means embedding Vercel inside a partner’s platform, co-building new products, or taking a joint offering to enterprises neither company could sell alone. This is a technical, cross-functional role: you’ll spend as much time with product and engineering leaders as with commercial ones, inside Vercel and across the table.

This is a hybrid role with 3 in-office days per week in San Francisco, Austin, or New York City.

What you'll do

• Own a named set of strategic partners end to end, from first conversation through signed agreement to launch and growth
• Identify and develop new partnerships across AI, cloud, commerce, and enterprise software
• Build the business case: size the opportunity, scope the product and engineering investment, and give leadership a clear recommendation, including when the answer is to pass
• Lead negotiations end to end, structuring agreements that are new to Vercel and often to the partner: revenue share, embedded pricing, co-sell commitments, marketplace terms
• Lead cross-functional teams across Product, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Finance, and Legal to take a signed agreement to launch, with clear milestones and the judgment to stop deals that are not working

What you need

• 8+ years developing, negotiating, and executing complex commercial agreements, ideally at a platform, infrastructure, cloud, or developer tools company
• Initiated partnerships with no precedent, with companies significantly larger than your own, and can walk through the terms you won and the ones you gave up
• Structured deals with significant technical surface area (platform integrations, embedded or whitelabeled product, licensing, compute commitments), and can hold a credible conversation about agents, inference, model routing, and cloud infrastructure
• Created and drove strategy, and got an organization to fund it
• Led cross-functional teams you don’t manage across Product, Engineering, Legal, Finance, and Sales

Bonus if you

• Have done partnerships at or with a hyperscaler, a frontier AI lab, or a large commerce or enterprise software platform
• Structured technology licensing, OEM, or embedded distribution agreements
• Started in a technical role (engineering, solutions architecture, or technical product) before moving into commercial work

The San Francisco, CA salary range for this role is $194,000 - $237,000, plus an annual company target bonus. Actual salary will be based on job-related skills, experience, and location. Compensation outside of San Francisco may be adjusted based on employee location. The total compensation package may include benefits, equity-based compensation, and eligibility for a company bonus or variable pay program depending on the role. Your recruiter can share more details during the hiring process.