Partnerships Manager

The role

This person will find, evaluate, negotiate, and manage strategic vendor and technology partners. They will own the partner lifecycle and work with Sales, Product, and Engineering to support enterprise deals and the ValonOS roadmap.

What you will do

• Source, evaluate, and recommend strategic vendor and technology partners.
• Own the partner lifecycle end to end including RFPs, negotiation, and onboarding.
• Negotiate commercial terms, SLAs, pricing, and partner agreements.
• Build and maintain executive-level relationships at key partners.
• Partner with Strategic AE and Sales Engineer to bring partners into enterprise deals.
• Work with Product and Engineering to align partner capabilities with the ValonOS roadmap.
• Partner with Security, Compliance, and Legal on third-party risk and vendor due diligence.
• Track partner performance, spend, and risk.
• Manage multi-threaded relationships and escalations.
• Build and document partner management playbooks and processes.

Required qualifications

• 5-10+ years in partnerships, business development, strategic alliances, vendor management, or procurement-adjacent strategy roles.
• Experience at an early-stage startup or a leading AI or technology company.
• Track record negotiating and managing complex technology or services agreements with payments, AI, data, or infrastructure providers.
• Experience working with Legal, Security, Finance, and Engineering stakeholders.
• Familiarity with third-party risk and vendor due diligence.
• Strong technical fluency regarding integrations, APIs, data movement, and implementation risk.
• Excellent written and verbal communication.
• High agency in ambiguous, founder-led, zero-to-one environments.

Nice to have

• prior mortgage or mortgage-technology experience is helpful

Benefits

• competitive salary
• meaningful stake in the company via equity
• 401(k) plan
• comprehensive medical, dental, & vision benefits
• daily lunch, and dinner provided through Forkable for in-office team members
• pre-tax deductions for public transit, rideshares, and parking
• company wide orientation
• learning & development opportunities
• quarterly budgets for team and company outings
• flexible paid time off with no annual limit
• sick days
• 11 company holidays

About the company

Valon is the leading AI platform for mortgage servicing, building the AI-native operating system for regulated finance. ValonOS is on track to power 1 in 6 U.S. mortgages across major mortgage servicers.