Alliances / Strategic Partnerships Lead

About Kombo

Why are customers like Xing, Factorial, and Figures and investors like Y-Combinator, the Indeed Founder, and the Plaid CTO, Stepstone CEO, and Beamery Founders excited about Kombo?

Kombo is changing how B2B SaaS companies provide HR integrations to their customers. Instead of having to build and maintain many APIs themselves, Kombos customers can integrate with Kombo's API once and offer dozens of APIs to their customers instantly. Kombo is solving the pain of implementing all those integrations one by one.

Kombo is growing strongly - to keep that pace, we need to establish close and long-term strategic partnerships with employment systems.

About our Team

The Kombo is a small team of excellent and hard-working individuals with a strong technical bias. The founding team met at University before dropping out and going through Y-Combinator. It's their second venture in the API space. Everyone at Kombo lives up to our commonly defined values:

🤍 Trust is the most important thing for our team. We share openly, and you can always be sure that your concerns are going to be handled respectfully. Please don’t hold back and share your concerns with your 1n1 partner (or the whole team). We always find a solution. 🙋 Direct Communication goes a long way next to trust. Tell the team when you feel like something isn’t right and should/could be improved. We are all constantly learning and improving, and appreciate it if someone points out where we could improve. 🚀 We are a Team We come together as the Kombo team to achieve a common goal. For that, we all strive to be the best in our discipline and constantly improve to contribute to the team. 👏 High Energy and Passion are the results of our values and ambition. We constantly motivate ourselves and each other.

About the Role

We're seeking an Alliances/Strategic Partnerships Lead Manager to spearhead partnerships with employment systems and other technology platforms for our early-stage startup. In this role, you'll be responsible for the entire acquisition process, including identifying potential partners, structuring deals, and negotiating contracts. You'll also be in charge of managing relationships with partners, aligning on goals, and ensuring mutual success. As a key driver of our mission to build a collaborative and connected employment data ecosystem, you'll develop deep relationships across the HR Tech ecosystem. You'll work closely with our Product and GTM teams, reporting to CEO of Kombo. As Alliances / Strategic Partnerships are a key growth enabler for Kombo, you will transition into a leadership role throughout the next 12m, managing and hiring partnerships managers.

What You Will Do

• Identify and research potential partners, reach out to key stakeholders, and determine if they are a good fit for a partnership with Kombo (work closely with the Product and GTM to decide on the integrations roadmap)
• Guide prospective partners through the discovery, negotiation, and contract phases.
• Onboard and launch newly signed partnerships, and own relationships post-launch across both channel and product partners.
• Help build and manage a partner program with well-defined, repeatable processes that enable our partners to accelerate growth.
• Build relationships and expand your network via industry conferences, dinners, and other events.
• Your time will be evenly split between forging new product partnerships, driving success with existing partners, and managing our partnership program
• Build an incentivization model for our partners to recommend us
• Structure and build the broader partnerships team from scratch

What You Bring

• 3+ years of business development (partnerships)
• Demonstrable track record of establishing and managing high-impact partnerships. Knowledge of partnership principles is a plus.
• Strong product gut and prior experience with APIs, integrations & HR Technology. Analytical thinking, business acumen, and relentless problem-solving.
• A strong bias for action. Outstanding communication skills and an empathetic, consultative approach toward partner relationships.
• Ability to travel to visit partners and attend conferences
• An entrepreneurial mindset, natural curiosity, and a desire to do something great.