Director, Channel Partnerships

We are looking for a commercially driven partnerships leader to build and scale Remote’s referral partner ecosystem.

You will recruit, manage, and activate partners across venture capital, banks, fintech, professional service providers, advisors, recruiters, and brokers. These are organizations and individuals that fast-growing companies already trust when making decisions about hiring, international expansion, and payroll. Your job is to make Remote their natural recommendation—and turn those recommendations into a predictable source of qualified pipeline and bookings.

You will lead a team of channel partnership managers, while staying hands-on with our highest-potential partners. You will own the channel’s commercial outcomes and build the strategy, programs, and operating discipline needed to scale.

This is not a “sign partners and hope referrals follow” role. It is a commercial leadership role where trusted relationships, partner activation, and repeatable execution translate into measurable revenue.

Key Responsibilities

Define where we play and how we win

• Set the referral channel strategy across partner verticals, customer segments, and markets.
• Identify which partners have genuine access to our target customers and a compelling reason to recommend Remote.
• Prioritize investment based on commercial potential, customer fit, speed to activation, and economics.
• Develop differentiated propositions for different partner types. A bank, VC fund, accounting firm, and recruiter will not all respond to the same playbook.

Recruit and land high-potential partners

• Build a focused partner recruitment pipeline and lead the acquisition of high-potential referral partners.
• Develop relationships across VC funds and their portfolio support teams, banks, fintech platforms, accounting and advisory firms, HR consultants, fractional CFOs and CHROs, recruiters, and PEO and benefits brokers.
• Structure and negotiate agreements that create clear value and sustainable economics for both parties.
• Qualify for willingness and ability to generate business—not just willingness to sign an agreement.

Activate partners and make them productive

• Own the journey from partner signature through, prospecting, onboarding, enablement, support, first referral, first booking, commission payments, event sponsorships, and repeat production.
• Help partners recognize the customer situations that create an opportunity for Remote: international hiring, expansion into new markets, distributed teams, and payroll complexity.
• Build practical enablement, referral workflows, communications, and campaigns that make recommending Remote easy.
• Work with Partner Marketing on scalable activation and nurture programs, rather than relying on individual relationship management alone.
• Build trusted senior relationships with key partners and use structured business reviews to drive action.
• Reactivate partners with potential and stop investing in relationships that do not produce.
• Partner with Integrations, Solutions Consulting, and Sales teams to develop high-value integrations that strengthen referral channels and drive strategic co-selling.
• Collaborate with Field Marketing to boost demand generation attendance and execute joint GTM initiatives, including curated events and co-sponsored activities.
• Align with Corporate Marketing to amplify key partnerships, showcase customer success stories, and produce pipeline-generating content that elevates brand awareness and co-sell performance.

Own partner-sourced pipeline and bookings

• Own the team’s partner-sourced pipeline and bookings targets, forecast, and performance.
• Work closely with Sales to ensure referrals are qualified, routed, followed up, and converted effectively.
• Identify where performance is blocked—partner engagement, referral quality, sales follow-up, customer fit, or commercial terms—and fix it.
• Establish clear rules for attribution and channel engagement. Distinguish genuinely partner-sourced business from activity that merely touches an existing opportunity.
• Track acquisition and servicing costs alongside revenue share to ensure channel growth is commercially sustainable.

Build a scalable operating model

• Turn successful experiments into repeatable playbooks for recruitment, onboarding, enablement, activation, and partner management.
• Work with RevOps to improve partner tracking, lead routing, reporting, and revenue-share processes.
• Segment the portfolio so high-touch management is reserved for partners that justify it, with programmatic support for the broader ecosystem.
• Use automation to reduce manual work and increase the team’s capacity to recruit and activate productive partners.

Lead and develop a high-performing team

• Hire, coach, and manage a team of channel partnership managers.
• Set clear ownership, targets, priorities, and operating rhythms.
• Coach the team to connect relationship-building with commercial outcomes.
• Stay close enough to partners and deals to understand what works. Lead from the front without becoming the bottleneck.

What you bring

• Experience building scalable partnership motions. You have built and improved a referral or channel business—not just managed an established portfolio.
• Commercial accountability. You have owned pipeline and bookings targets and can explain how your actions changed the number.
• People leadership. You have hired, coached, and managed a high-performing commercial team.
• Trusted-advisor credibility. You know how to build lasting relationships with professional services firms, advisors, and other organizations whose recommendations carry weight with customers.
• Strong business judgement. You can distinguish a prestigious partner from a productive one, and know where to invest time and resources.
• Operating rigor. You turn ambiguity into clear priorities, repeatable processes, and measurable outcomes.
• A builder’s mindset. You build new systems; you do not just operate within them. You know when to standardize and when a vertical needs a different approach.
• Experience with fast-growing companies. You understand how they buy, who influences their decisions, and how their international hiring and payroll needs evolve.
• Strong cross-functional execution. You work effectively with Sales, Marketing, RevOps, Legal, and Finance to make partnerships work in practice.
• EOR or global payroll experience is highly preferred. An established network across relevant referral partner verticals is a strong advantage.

What success looks like

• Consistent delivery against partner-sourced pipeline and bookings targets.
• A growing base of productive partners that generate qualified opportunities repeatedly—not just signed agreements.
• Faster activation: less time from signing a partner to their first qualified referral and first booking.
• Improving referral quality, conversion, and productivity per partner and per team member.
• A scalable channel motion with sustainable economics, clear attribution, and a strong partner experience.

You won’t be a fit if

• You measure success primarily by signed partners, meetings, or relationship sentiment.
• You expect to apply the same familiar playbook across every vertical.
• You want to set strategy but stay removed from partner recruitment, activation, and deal execution.
• You have only operated within mature programs and have not built a motion yourself.

Practicals

• You’ll report to: GM & VP Partnerships
• Direct Reports: 5-6
• Location: AMER preferred
• Travel: Regular travel expected

Application process

1. Interview with recruiter
2. Team Interview 1
3. Interview with future manager
4. Team interview 2
5. Exercise
6. Bar Raiser Interview
7. Prior employment verification check