Strategic Partnerships Lead

About Sycamore

Sycamore is building the trusted agent operating system for the enterprise. Our platform helps companies build, deploy, and orchestrate agentic apps that take on real operational work, with the security and control large organizations need.

We are a small, engineering-led team working directly with Fortune 500 enterprises. We have raised $65M from Coatue and Lightspeed, along with other investors and industry leaders.

The role

Enterprises do not adopt a new platform in isolation. They adopt it through the cloud they have standardized on, the systems integrator running their transformation program, the software vendors whose systems hold their data, and the model providers they have already approved. You will own that surface: deciding which partnerships actually matter, building them into working relationships rather than press releases, and making them produce something measurable.

As Sycamore’s first and initially only partnerships employee, you will personally find and qualify partners, secure their first meaningful commitments, and generate and close customer opportunities through those partnerships. You will combine commercial judgment with enough product fluency to connect customer needs to Sycamore’s capabilities, assess what a partner can deliver, and identify assumptions that need validation. You will work with Commercial Leads, Product and Engineering as the opportunity requires, while retaining ownership of partnership execution and commercial progress. Product and Engineering will validate integrations, deployment requirements and delivery commitments before they are promised. You are expected to decline partnerships whose demands are not justified by customer and business value.

What you will do

• Own Sycamore’s partnership strategy: which categories matter, which partners within them, and in what sequence.
• Drive measurable outcomes: partner-sourced and co-sold pipeline, customer revenue, and deployment impact, with clear evidence of the partnership’s contribution.
• Maintain an honest view of which partnerships are working, and end the ones that are not.

What we are looking for

• 8-15 years of experience in partnerships, alliances, business development, or a technical commercial role with direct ownership of partner-driven outcomes. We will make exceptions for exceptional people in either direction.
• A track record of personally originating partnerships and turning them into customer revenue or meaningful deployment outcomes, with specifics about what you did, the resources you started with, and the results.
• Experience with at least one of: hyperscaler ecosystems and marketplaces, global systems integrators, ISV integration partnerships, or model and infrastructure provider relationships.
• Commercial and contract judgment suited to your partnership motion, including partner incentives, economics, obligations, and co-sell or marketplace structures where relevant.
• The discipline to say no. You can tell a strategically flattering partnership from one that will produce anything.
• Strong relationship-building across partner field teams, product teams, and executives.
• Clear written communication, particularly in making the internal case for or against an investment.
• AI-native. You use modern AI systems in your own work and can speak credibly about the agent and model ecosystem.
• Comfort with startup ambiguity, broad ownership, and regular travel.

Interview process

1. Recruiter screen to discuss your background, interest and practical fit.
2. A 30-minute conversation with Adam on the role, your experience and building partnerships as an individual contributor at our stage.
3. A 30-minute conversation with Rory on product fluency, customer value and turning a partnership into something customers can adopt.
4. A 45-minute conversation with Eric on partner origination, personal selling and commercial execution.
5. A candidate exercise: recommend a focused partnership strategy and execution plan for your first 90 days, using a shared hypothetical brief. You will have up to 72 hours from receipt of the complete brief to submit, with no more than half a day of preparation. Choose the format that communicates your thinking clearly.
6. A 45-minute working session: approximately 20 minutes to present, followed by 10–15 minutes of collaborative discussion, with time for your questions and any overrun.
7. References and a final 30-minute conversation.

Why join

• Build the partnership strategy for a company defining a new enterprise category, from the beginning.
• Work across the cloud, model, integrator, and software ecosystems that enterprise AI actually runs through.
• Work with Product and Engineering to validate and deliver the capabilities that make your chosen partnerships valuable to customers.
• Own outcomes that are measured in deployments and revenue rather than announcements.
• Join early enough to decide what the partnership function is, rather than inherit it.
• Receive competitive cash compensation and meaningful equity in the company you are helping build.