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Gradient Labs is building an AI customer operations platform for financial services, with specialist agents designed to eliminate manual work across customer support and back-office operations. Founded in 2023, the company works with major banking and fintech institutions and recently closed a Series A extension with backing from Redpoint, Octopus Ventures, and CommerzVentures.
As the founding Partnerships Lead, you will own the full partnerships function end-to-end, from managing and growing existing relationships to proactively building new ones across a diverse partner landscape. This includes hyperscalers (AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud), core banking providers (Fiserv, Jack Henry, FIS, Temenos, Mambu, 10x), global consultancies and systems integrators (Deloitte and similar), boutique advisory firms, and BPOs.
Key responsibilities include:
- Manage and grow existing partnerships: own day-to-day relationships with current technology and consulting partners, identify expansion opportunities across new use cases and stakeholders, and represent Gradient Labs in partner-facing forums and joint planning sessions.
- Build new partnerships proactively: map and prioritize the partner landscape, conduct cold outreach, and carry relationships from initial contact through to structured partnerships (referral, co-sell, technical integration, or reseller arrangements).
- Negotiate and structure partnership terms in collaboration with legal, sales, and leadership.
- Build the function: establish how partnership impact is tracked and reported (sourced and influenced pipeline, co-sell revenue), create repeatable playbooks by partner type, and make the case for hiring a team as the function scales.
You'll be the first dedicated hire in this function, building the playbook as much as executing it. The role is scoped as an individual contributor today with a clear path to hiring and leading a team as the partner motion scales.
Ideal candidates have experience building or significantly growing a partnerships function at a B2B SaaS company, ideally selling into financial services or another regulated industry. You should be equally credible managing hyperscaler alliances and courting boutique advisory firms, with strong bias for cold outreach and starting relationships from scratch. You'll need commercial judgment to structure partnership agreements, negotiate terms, and assess partnership value. Excellent written and verbal communication is essential, as you'll represent Gradient Labs to senior stakeholders at much larger organizations.
