Head of Partnerships

ABOUT MIDDESK: Middesk is building the data and intelligence infrastructure that helps businesses work together with confidence. We started by creating a comprehensive platform for understanding businesses, bringing together authoritative and proprietary data to help customers verify business identities, onboard customers faster, and manage risk throughout the customer lifecycle. Today, Middesk is used by more than 700 banks and fintechs, and in 2025 we verified more than 7 million companies. We've also expanded beyond business verification to help companies form, register, manage, and maintain their businesses, supporting more than 50,000 companies in setting up over 100,000 accounts required to hire employees, run payroll, and stay compliant. Middesk came out of Y Combinator, and is backed by Sequoia Capital, Accel, Insight Partners, and Canapi. We're proud to be named on the Forbes Fintech 50 and Best Startup Employers lists. THE ROLE As the Head of Partnerships at Middesk, you will own and evolve our partnership function - a channel that today already directly or indirectly influences a third of Middesk’s revenue. Your mandate is to build on that strong foundation and take the function to the next level: a predictable, accelerating growth engine for the business. You will lead a team working on two fronts. The first is deepening our largest reseller relationships, developing them from strong channel revenue engines into active demand-generation and co-selling partnerships. The second is building new partnership types, including SIs, referral partners, AI-native platforms, and adjacent verticals, to extend our reach into segments and use cases we don't serve today. You will also be responsible for embedding partner strategy across Middesk's go-to-market motion, ensuring partners are a considered input to territory planning, pipeline generation, product launches, and competitive deal strategy rather than a channel operating separately from Sales. Partnerships is already material to how Middesk grows. This role decides how much more it can be. You will have executive sponsorship, an established partner base to build from, and real latitude to define what this function becomes at our next stage. We follow a hybrid work model, and for this role, there is an expectation of 3 days per week in our SF/NYC office. Candidates should be based within a commutable distance, as we believe in the value of in-person collaboration and building strong team connections while also supporting flexibility where possible. WHAT YOU'LL DO: Turn our largest partnerships into growth engines - Convert our largest partners from resellers into genuine co-sell partners. Build joint account mapping and planning, shared deal visibility, and joint go-to-market motions so Middesk is at the table with the customer rather than behind the partner. - Convert existing partner goodwill into proactively sourced pipeline. Design the programs, incentives, and tracking that turn strong relationships into named-account referrals, not just resold channel revenue. - Grow integration breadth and enablement across our most strategic partnerships, covering new Middesk products and equipping partner sellers to lead on value rather than price, so Middesk is not treated as a commodity line item. Build the next generation of partner types - Identify, prioritize, and stand up new partner types and verticals, including referral partners, AI-native and agentic platforms, and adjacent categories, to diversify our channel. - Build the enablement playbooks and onboarding motions that accelerate time to revenue. Make partnerships a core part of how Middesk goes to market - Partner with Sales leadership and RevOps to define and enforce clear rules of engagement: co-selling, deal ownership, deal registration, credit and comp alignment, and escalation paths. The goal is to eliminate lane confusion and make Sales and Partnerships a coordinated engine on shared opportunities. - Make partners a considered input to territory planning, pipeline generation, product launches, and competitive deal strategy, so partner motion is part of the GTM plan rather than a parallel one. - Represent partner and channel needs in the product roadmap, particularly integration depth and the technical requirements of newer partner categories such as AI-native platforms. Build the team and the operating foundation - Grow and develop the partnerships team, with clear ownership across existing-partner management and new-partnership development, and coach the career growth of the people on it. - Work with RevOps to build the systems and processes, from onboarding to enablement to reporting, that scale partner operations and give the business real visibility into channel performance. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR: - 5+ years leading partnerships at a technology company, ideally with experience across multiple partner archetypes rather than a single model: embedded and platform partnerships, data partnerships, referral partnerships, and traditional reseller or systems-integrator relationships. - Direct experience in financial services or fintech, with established relationships across the partner ecosystem Middesk works in. - A track record of building a referral or co-sell motion from a low base, not just scaling one that already worked, including in emerging or unproven categories such as AI-native platforms. - Success managing complex, senior-level relationships with large enterprise and platform partners, and the negotiating skill to move a partner from a transactional reseller agreement to a joint go-to-market partnership. - Experience selling or partnering around technical, API-driven, or usage and data-licensing products, with enough technical fluency to engage partner product and engineering teams credibly on integration scope. Ability to leverage such relationships to successfully integrate new Middesk products into existing partnerships from both a product integration and GTM perspective. - A data-driven approach to prioritizing growth opportunities, including a clear point of view on how partner-sourced and partner-influenced revenue should be measured differently. - Experience identifying and launching partnerships in emerging or unproven categories, and comfort operating in build-from-zero mode rather than only managing mature, established partnership types. - A track record of hiring, developing, and retaining partnerships talent at a growth-stage company.