Director of Strategic Partnerships & Alliances

As a Director of Strategic Partnerships & Alliances at vCluster, you aren’t just managing relationships; you are architecting our ecosystem’s gravity. Sitting at the high-stakes intersection of Sales, Product, and the emerging neo-cloud landscape, you will be a key contributor to our market dominance by building a world-class partner motion that scales as we define the Kubernetes virtualization category.

Your Role and Impact:

• Neo-Cloud Ecosystem Engineering: Own the ultimate outcome: partner-sourced revenue and measurable consumption. You will transform our opportunistic touchpoints into a disciplined, high-performance engine, focusing on next-gen platforms like CoreWeave, Lambda, Crusoe, and Nebius.

• Strategic Alliance Mastery: Lead executive-level engagement with emerging cloud platforms and managed Kubernetes providers. You will focus on building sophisticated joint GTM plans that ensure vCluster is the foundational standard for AI-native infrastructure.

• AI Literacy & Augmentation: Naturally integrate AI-native workflows to automate routine partner management tasks, brainstorm co-marketing at scale, and accelerate GTM delivery. You will demonstrate the ability to structure complex queries for LLMs to extract high-value market intelligence while maintaining a "human-in-the-loop" approach to ensure brand alignment.

• The Revenue-Partner Bridge: Lead the alignment between "ecosystem interest" and "closed-won deals." You will collaborate closely with Sales, SEs, and Marketing to identify high-leverage distribution opportunities that drive high-impact pipeline and consumption.

• Disciplined Execution: Manage diverse partnership tasks—from establishing lightweight tracking and reporting to identifying whitespace opportunities across next-gen providers—with a "value over volume" mentality.

This Role is a Fit for You If:

• Experience: You have 8+ years in Partnerships, Alliances, or Ecosystem roles within cloud, infrastructure, or developer platforms, ideally having scaled partner motions from zero-to-one during periods of rapid growth.

• Neo-Cloud Expertise: You have direct experience working with or within neo-cloud providers and managed Kubernetes platforms, with a proven track record of driving actual revenue (not just relationship management).

• Cognitive Flexibility: You are an open-minded professional—willing to abandon legacy "hyperscaler-only" partnership models in favor of a modern, scrappy, and builder-oriented approach that prioritizes alternative cloud ecosystems.

• Strategic Thinking: You don't just follow a partnership template; you anticipate future trends in AI-native infrastructure and identify complex co-sell entry points with innovative solutions.

Bonus Points For:

• Analytical Prowess: A background in using data and analytics to track ecosystem health, marketplace motions, and partner-sourced pipeline velocity.

• Technical Fluency: Familiarity with the CNCF landscape and experience working alongside industry leaders like VAST Data, Weka, or platform specialists.

• Modern GTM Mindset: You thrive in environments that reject "manual" relationship management and prefer a modern stack where you can solve the partnership puzzle through automation, continuous AI discovery, and executive-level alignment.

About vCluster Labs

We are a venture-backed tech startup and the company pioneering Kubernetes virtualization for the AI era. We raised +$30M from top-tier VCs such as Khosla Ventures (first investor in OpenAI, GitLab, Stripe, Doordash) and are in a hyper-growth phase looking for motivated people to complement our team. Our headquarters are in San Francisco (Salesforce Tower), but our team is distributed around the globe and we have a remote-first work culture.

We are the leading platform for operating GPU infrastructure, enabling AI Cloud providers to deliver a hyperscaler-like experience to their customers and AI factories that need to build that same experience for their internal teams. Our platform delivers the full operational stack operators need to run their GPU data centers — managed Kubernetes, fast isolated tenant provisioning, and automated node provisioning and lifecycle management — enabling them to accelerate time to value, reduce operational burden, and maximize the ROI of every GPU.

We're the company behind vCluster, an open-source technology for virtualizing Kubernetes (10k+ GitHub stars, 40M+ virtual clusters created since 2021). Open source is part of our DNA. At KubeCon North America 2025, we launched our Infrastructure Tenancy Platform for AI — a Kubernetes-native framework purpose-built for running AI, ML, and GPU-intensive workloads anywhere, with an NVIDIA-validated reference architecture for DGX systems.

Benefits

We offer the following benefits:

• Competitive Salary: We offer a competitive compensation package, including equity.

• Platinum-Level Insurance: Health, dental, vision, and life Insurance, including plans for you and eligible dependents (benefits vary depending on country).

• Flexible Working Schedule: You have a doctor’s appointment or need to head to the supermarket to get groceries at 2pm? We won’t have an issue with that. To us, results matter more than clocking in and out at the same time every day.

• Workplace Flexibility: We’re very flexible about where you work. We know things can change in life and we’re happy to adjust the work environment for you along the way.

Culture & Values

At vCluster Labs, we value and stand for:

1. Make it Happen: We have a relentless bias for action and the grit to push through obstacles. We do whatever it takes to figure it out, put in the work, and ruthlessly prioritize the actions that drive measurable impact for the business.

2. Own the Outcome: We understand that our responsibility doesn't end when a task is checked off; it ends when the value is delivered. We connect our daily individual actions to the broader success of the company and our customers.

3. Create Wow: We measure success by the experience we generate, both inside and outside the company. For our customers, this means impressive speed and intuitive experiences. For our team, this means going the extra mile to support one another and to continuously drive each other to new heights.

4. Open Source, Open Mind: We are actively contributing to and maintaining open-source projects. Internally, we foster meritocracy — the strongest ideas win, no matter who or where they come from.

5. Build Tomorrow’s Standards, Intentionally: We don't just ship software; we define the state-of-the-art of tomorrow. We are fearless in tearing down old approaches to build something better, but we are disciplined in how we do it because we know our users rely on our technology to run mission-critical infrastructure platforms.

Compensation Range: $280K - $320K