Senior Manager, Channel Partnerships

About Tamara

About the role

Partner strategy and acquisition

• Translate UAE priorities into a focused partner acquisition and growth plan; map and prioritize relevant partner types and vertical ecosystems.
• Assess opportunities for merchant reach, category fit, distribution, readiness, activation, risk, and expected economics; maintain a qualified pipeline and realistic timelines.
• Originate relationships, prepare commercial business cases, recommend approved partnership models, and negotiate within delegated authority.
• Coordinate contracting and required approvals with Legal and relevant pricing, risk, compliance, and commercial stakeholders; escalate exceptions.

Enablement and portfolio growth

• Build joint business plans and equip partner teams with training, product knowledge, sales playbooks, collateral, and escalation routes.
• Coordinate co-marketing, campaigns, referrals, and merchant outreach; set lead registration, attribution, routing, ownership, and handoff rules.
• Improve conversion through onboarding, first transaction, and sustained activity; identify partner-portfolio expansion opportunities.
• Own portfolio goals, conduct performance and quarterly business reviews, manage senior relationships and escalations, and implement recovery plans.
• Analyze conversion, GMV velocity, cohort retention, yield, and channel ROI to detect underperformance and optimize strategic focus.

Experience and expertise

• Significant experience in partnerships, business development, platform partnerships, payments, acquiring, fintech, e-commerce, SaaS, or ecosystem-led distribution.
• Track record scaling partner channels with measurable acquisition, activation, revenue, and GMV results; understanding of referral, reseller, aggregator, marketplace, payment-provider, acquirer, and POS models.
• Proven complex commercial negotiation experience, including agreements, revenue shares, pricing, incentives, and multi-year commitments.
• Experience managing technical integrations and cross-functional launches with Product, Engineering, Operations, Legal, Risk, Compliance, and Finance.
• Strong commercial and analytical capability across pipeline, conversion, unit economics, profitability, cohort quality, and forecasting.
• Experience designing partner tiering, enablement, scorecards, QBRs, engagement rules, and incentive models; ability to balance growth with regulatory and operational considerations.
• Strong senior stakeholder management and executive communication; experience leading multi-market or geographically distributed partnership teams.
• Familiarity with GCC commerce platforms, PSPs, acquirers, POS providers, and merchant ecosystems is strongly preferred.

Languages

• Excellent English communication is required.
• Arabic capability is advantageous.