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Thought Machine is a fintech company on a mission to modernize banking by replacing legacy technology with cloud-native core and payments platforms. With £500m+ in funding from top-tier investors (JPMorgan Chase, Standard Chartered, Temasek, Molten Ventures, Eurazeo), the company has grown to 550+ employees across London, New York, Singapore, Sydney, and Lisbon.
As Global Head of Partnerships, you will lead a team of five Partnership Managers to architect and execute a world-class partner ecosystem that accelerates Thought Machine's growth and enhances client value. This is a manager-of-managers role reporting to senior leadership, with responsibility for global partnership strategy across North America, EMEA, LATAM, and APAC.
Key responsibilities include:
- Ecosystem Strategy: Identify and prioritize partnership categories (payment networks, AI specialists, integrators) that strengthen competitive position and solve client needs.
- Commercial Deal Architecture: Design and negotiate high-stakes agreements, including joint go-to-market strategies, revenue sharing, and incentive structures that drive profitable ARR growth.
- Commercial Enablement & GTM: Develop sales playbooks and enablement tools to turn joint solutions into sellable product sets, accelerating sales cycles and market entry.
- Team Leadership & Scaling: Build and scale a high-performing partnership team, shifting from transactional introductions to executed commercial outcomes with repeatable global processes.
- Market-Product Alignment: Collaborate with Product Leadership to ensure partnerships and integrations are high-quality, reliable, and deliver immediate client value.
- Strategic Intelligence: Provide market insights and competitive analysis to inform build-vs-buy-vs-partner decisions.
- Partner Enablement: Establish "Vault-Certified" standards defining technical and operational benchmarks; structure programs to help partners confidently sell and deliver solutions.
- Regional Expansion: Develop localized partnership strategies ensuring global strength with regional compliance.
- Performance Tracking: Implement frameworks measuring ecosystem health via partner-influenced pipeline, integration adoption, and customer time-to-value.
Ideal candidates bring extensive experience in partnerships, business development, or product strategy within fintech or enterprise SaaS. You should have a track record closing complex multi-million pound deals, understanding how to align technical roadmaps with partners, and navigating procurement, legal, and risk hurdles in financial services. Strong commercial acumen, solution-oriented thinking, internal/external influence, and team development experience are essential. You are a master communicator comfortable negotiating with global incumbents and C-suite stakeholders.
