Partner Development Manager, AI Ecosystem

Build, recruit and manage AI partnerships

Build and source the pipeline

Run recruitment events and build assets

Onboard partners at scale

What you will bring

Nice to have

• Experience with the Salesforce ecosystem: AppExchange, ISV partner programmes or AIforce.
• Experience at an AI-native startup, AI lab, hyperscaler AI or startup partner team, accelerator or venture capital firm.
• Experience building and shipping your own AI agents or integrations, including side projects.
• Understanding of how AI products are priced and sold, such as consumption or usage-based pricing and marketplace revenue share.
• Connections in the AI startup community outside the US.
• Awareness of the regulation shaping enterprise AI adoption, such as GDPR and EU data residency, the EU AI Act, and requirements in regulated sectors like financial services.
• Additional languages.

Responsibilities

• Build a portfolio of AI-native partners outside the US from zero, and run each deal yourself, from cold outreach to signed agreement, live integration and ongoing growth.
• Build joint value propositions with partner product teams, including how their product works with AIforce, Headless 360 and MCP.
• Run your own deals: lead recruitment conversations with founders and partnership leaders, own each opportunity in Salesforce, agree the partnership and close the agreement.
• After signing, run each partnership: joint plans, adoption by Salesforce customers, co-marketing, customer stories and regular business reviews.
• Spot partners with the potential for larger commercial deals and work with the Senior Partner Development Manager and the Partner Solutions team to close them.
• Map and research AI-native companies by market and category, and keep a prioritised target list based on customer demand and fit.
• Prospect every week through cold calls, cold emails and LinkedIn outreach, as well as warm introductions, venture capital firms, accelerators and founder communities.
• Work with Salesforce account executives, solution engineers and regional sales teams to find partners their customers are asking for.
• Identify companies already integrating with Salesforce, including through Headless 360 or our Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, and bring them into the programme.
• Plan and run partner recruitment events, such as founder meetups, AI builder sessions, hackathons and roundtables, often co-hosted with VCs, accelerators or Salesforce teams, and represent the programme at World Tours and Dreamforce.
• Create the recruitment toolkit: pitch materials, one-pagers, programme FAQs, partner case studies and demo content, tailored by market and category.
• Run onboarding for many partners at the same time through a repeatable playbook, from partner agreement to technical enablement, security review and AgentExchange listing.
• Track every partner's progress in Salesforce, find where partners stall and improve the process, using templates, automation and AI tools to keep volume high and quality consistent.
• Report on pipeline, partners live and partner performance, and bring partner feedback to Salesforce product teams.
• 3 to 5 years (or equivalent experience) in partner management, partnerships, alliances or business development at a software, cloud or AI company, including recruiting and managing technology or ISV partners.
• Experience recruiting partners and closing partner agreements, and then growing those partnerships after launch.
• AI partnership experience: you have closed partnerships with AI-native companies building agents, models or AI developer tools, or with developer platforms, data or API-first companies, and can name the partnerships you closed.
• A technical background, ideally in AI: either experience in a technical role such as engineering, solutions engineering or technical product, or hands-on experience building with LLM APIs, AI agents or MCP servers.
• Working knowledge of how AI agents are built and connected: LLMs, agent orchestration, tool calling and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) or similar integration standards. You can hold a credible technical conversation with a startup founder or CTO.
• Experience running many partners or accounts at once with a repeatable process, and improving that process as volume grows.
• Comfortable with research and data: you build your own target lists, use AI tools well and keep a clean pipeline in Salesforce or another CRM.
• Experience organising events or community programmes, and creating clear, persuasive partner materials.
• Ambition and a hands-on approach: you are comfortable prospecting and cold calling, and you want to build something new from a blank page, move fast and take on more responsibility as the ecosystem grows.
• Clear written and spoken communication, and comfort working across countries and cultures.