Channel Partnerships Lead (Founding Hire)
BlueOptima is an engineering intelligence platform used by many of the world's largest banks and enterprises. We give CTOs, CIOs and CFOs objective, code-level data on engineering productivity, AI ROI and impact, quality, and cost. Every large engineering organisation is now trying to prove its AI coding investment is paying off. We can answer that question, and partners who sit inside those organisations are the fastest way to get us into the conversation.
We are a team of around 110 people across the UK, US, India, Mexico, Japan and Canada and we work closely across teams and time zones. People here are given real ownership early and the autonomy to run with it. If you like seeing your work change how a company operates, you will feel at home.
Location : London
Salary : Base £70 - £90K, £10K execution Bonus
Job Description
You're our first partnerships hire. There's no programme, no partner portal and no inherited book. You'll recruit the partners, sign them, and get them putting deals in front of our Account Executives.
What You'll Actually Do
- Build your own target list and run your own outreach. Nobody will hand you warm leads.
- Recruit two kinds of partner. First, cloud marketplace and hyperscaler ecosystem partners, where we co-sell through AWS and Azure Marketplace. Second, consultancies and systems integrators with real relationships inside enterprise financial services and technology engineering teams.
- Take each partner from first conversation through commercial agreement to their first registered deal.
- Build what the programme runs on: the referral and commission model, deal registration in HubSpot, onboarding, enablement material and partner scorecards. You'll test the margin assumptions with Finance yourself.
- Co-sell alongside our AEs, including marketplace transactions, and keep the partner pipeline in HubSpot accurate enough to forecast from every week.
Qualifications
What you need
- Three to five years in partnerships, alliances or channel sales in B2B software, including recruiting and signing new partners yourself.
- Proof you've built something: you were the first or second partnerships person somewhere, or you launched a new partner motion, and you can show the pipeline it produced.
- A working understanding of how cloud marketplace and co-sell transactions work.
- Enough commercial and technical fluency to explain a technical product to a consulting partner and to defend a margin model to a CFO.
This role is not for you if - Your experience is mainly managing an established partner base, working inside a large SI's alliance structure, or running a high-volume reseller channel. You'll be building from a blank page with a small team around you.
Additional Information
What success looks like
Within 90 days you have a qualified target list, a commission model Finance has signed off, and live conversations with at least six prospective partners. Within six months you have signed partners registering deals in HubSpot. Within a year partner-sourced pipeline is a line our AEs and the CRO plan around.
Where this leads
A defined path to Head of Channels and Alliances as the programme grows.
Benefits
- 🌴 32 days of holidays (including bank holidays)
- 🗓️ Annual Leave purchase (up to 5 extra days)
- 💻 Work from Home Equipment allowance
- 🏡 Flexible Work from Home: 2 days remote a week, 3 days in office
- ✈️ Flexible Work from Long Distance: 4 weeks a year
- 👶 12 Weeks Paid Maternity and Paternity Leave
- 🐶 Pet friendly office
- 📚 Sponsored Learning Opportunities
- 🚲 Cycle2work scheme
- 🎉 Team Socials
Stay connected with us on LinkedIn or keep an eye on our career page for future opportunities!
