SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
vCluster Labs is seeking a Director of Technology Alliances to build a zero-to-one OEM and ISV partnership program for its AI infrastructure platform. This is a founding role with no inherited team or channel—you own the strategy, execution, and revenue number end-to-end.
You will own five core areas:
1. OEM Alliance Strategy: Drive partnerships with server and systems vendors (Dell, HPE, Supermicro, Lenovo, Cisco) building validated AI infrastructure designs. Design and launch the OEM commercial model (embedded SKUs, unit economics, tiered pricing, royalty structures, order templates). Negotiate and close agreements. Monitor OEM AI factory roadmaps to identify design cycles early.
2. ISV Portfolio Development: Scope, prioritize, and drive integrations with storage, network, scheduler, observability, security, data, MLOps, and inference vendors. Land vCluster as the tenant isolation layer through embedding, reselling, or co-selling. Kill integrations that won't produce revenue. Ensure integrations change the partner's roadmap, not just add a logo.
3. Sell-With Motion: Design repeatable co-sell plays on top of integrations (account mapping, joint solution briefs, field engagement, deal registration). Connect opportunities to vCluster's regional sellers, channel partners, and NVIDIA alliance. Take bundles to market through partner sales motions.
4. Technical Alignment: Represent partner technology requirements inside vCluster Product and Engineering with evidence (accounts, revenue, impact). Write integration specifications and acceptance criteria. Own licensing, telemetry, air-gapped operation, support boundaries, and lifecycle clarity.
5. Program Design and Scaling: Design and launch the technology alliance program (tiers, technical certification, joint solution briefs, marketplace paths, self-serve integration). Build a program that scales beyond your personal management.
6. Partnership Metrics and Reporting: Own partner-influenced pipeline, integration milestones, joint bookings, and field activation. Report weekly with MEDDPICC discipline, forecast accuracy, and data-driven gap closure.
vCluster Labs is a venture-backed startup (raised $28M+ from Khosla Ventures and others) headquartered in San Francisco with a distributed, remote-first team. The company powers 100,000+ GPUs and 1M+ CPUs across 50+ AI clouds and Fortune 500 companies. The platform runs the full stack for AI infrastructure operators—from bare metal provisioning through managed Kubernetes, Slurm, Ray, and inference clusters. vCluster is the open-source technology behind tenant isolation on Kubernetes (11,000+ GitHub stars, 40M+ tenant clusters created since 2021). At KubeCon North America 2025, the company launched its Infrastructure Tenancy Platform for AI with an NVIDIA-validated reference architecture for DGX systems.
Requirements:
- 10+ years in technology alliances, OEM or ISV partnerships, partner sales, or ecosystem leadership in enterprise infrastructure software, with proven track record of integrations and design wins producing significant, measurable partner-influenced revenue. Must be able to name specific deals.
- Deep OEM and ISV ecosystem experience: proven ability to embed a product in someone else's stack (validated design, reference architecture, OEM catalog, marketplace listing, shipped ISV integration). Experience navigating large, matrixed organizations from engineering to GTM leadership. Direct, current relationships with hardware OEMs (Dell, HPE, Supermicro, Lenovo, Cisco), storage vendors (VAST Data, WEKA, DDN, NetApp, Pure), and infrastructure ISVs. Must be able to name people, not just logos.
- AI infrastructure fluency: working understanding of Kubernetes, cloud-native platforms, and AI/ML infrastructure. Knowledge of GPU stack (DGX and NVL-class systems, networking, DPUs, schedulers, inference serving). Ability to assess integration complexity and earn credibility with architects while translating to executive ROI.
- Commercial construction: ability to build price books, model royalties, and structure support/warranty flow-down that engineering and legal will approve. Demonstrated negotiation strength on embedding agreements.
- Influence without authority: proven ability to mobilize cross-functional teams (Product, Engineering, Marketing, regional sales) on both sides of an alliance without direct control. Write acceptance criteria; do not forward requests.
- Operating rigor and builder's instinct: disciplined qualification (MEDDPICC or equivalent), forecasting hygiene, reporting discipline. Comfort in ambiguous, high-velocity environments with no inherited program or team. Compress timelines rather than manage them. Hiring for a builder, not a caretaker.
Bonus qualifications:
- Prior OEM design work: history of getting software named in a server OEM's AI infrastructure reference or validated design.
- NVIDIA partner ecosystem experience: NCP, ISV certification, or reference architecture programs.
- Open-source ecosystem credibility: CNCF standing or maintainer/contributor experience in adjacent projects. Understanding of boundary between open projects and embedded commercial products.
- Adjacent stack and marketplace fluency: production experience with Slurm, Ray, Run:ai, or inference serving stacks. Cloud marketplace private offers and committed-spend drawdown across AWS, Azure, or GCP.
