Director of Technology Alliances - OEM/ISV Partnerships

As Director of Technology Alliances at vCluster Labs, you aren’t just shipping integrations; you are deciding which stack the world’s AI factories get built out of. Every AI factory ships as a stack: servers from an OEM, a validated design, a scheduler, an observability layer, a data platform, a management plane. The tenant isolation layer is the part nobody has solved. Your job is to make sure that layer is already in the OEM’s reference architecture, already in the price book, and already integrated with the ISVs sitting next to us before the customer ever runs a bake-off. Being in the design is worth more than winning the deal, because you win every deal that design produces. (Internally titled Director, Alliances, OEM/ISV)

This is a founding, zero-to-one role on a first-year partner program. There is no partner channel to inherit and no team underneath you. You own the number, the agreements behind it, and the product that ships inside someone else’s box.

As Director of Technology Alliances, OEM/ISV, your role will include:

• Owning the OEM alliance strategy: You will own the server and systems vendors building validated AI infrastructure designs end to end: strategy, executive alignment, program agreements, and business reviews. You will design and stand up the OEM commercial model (embedded SKUs, unit economics, tiered pricing for bundled and embedded distribution, royalty and per-node constructs, and a standard OEM order template that lets legal review once and the field move fast), then negotiate and close the orders. You will monitor each OEM’s AI factory roadmap to spot the design cycle before it closes, not after.

• Building the ISV portfolio: You will scope, prioritize, and drive integrations with the storage, network, scheduler, observability, security, data, MLOps, and inference vendors whose customers overlap with ours, running it as a portfolio with explicit thresholds, not a queue of requests. You will land vCluster inside ISV and SaaS platforms as the tenant isolation layer, whether the ISV embeds it, resells it, or co-sells it. You will kill integrations that will not produce, and say so early. An ISV embed that does not change the partner’s own roadmap is a logo, not a route.

• Building the sell-with motion: A shipped integration with no joint motion behind it is a cost, not an asset. You will design repeatable co-sell plays on top of every integration that earns one (account mapping, joint solution briefs, field-to-field engagement, deal registration the partner’s sellers actually use), then connect the resulting opportunities to vCluster’s regional sellers, channel partners, and the NVIDIA alliance to close. You take bundles to market through the partner’s own sales motion, not around it.

• Driving technical alignment on both sides: You will represent partner technology requirements inside vCluster Product and Engineering with evidence attached (which accounts, what revenue, what happens if we do nothing), through one front door: licensing, telemetry, air-gapped operation, support boundaries, and lifecycle. You will write the integration specifications and acceptance criteria yourself. Integration work fails on unclear criteria far more often than on technical difficulty, and that clarity is yours to own.

• Building the technology alliance program: You will design and launch the program itself: tiers, technical certification requirements, joint solution briefs, marketplace and private offer paths, and a self-serve path so a small ISV can integrate without you in the loop. The program has to scale past the partners you personally manage.

• Owning the partnership number: You will report partner-influenced pipeline, integration and certification milestones, joint bookings contribution, and field activation to vCluster leadership, with MEDDPICC on every joint opportunity and weekly pipeline inspection. This is a first-year partner program with team MBOs and OKRs; you show up to the weekly inspection with your own numbers, your own forecast, and your own plan to close the gap. Data over opinions. Process over heroics.

This role could be a fit for you if you bring:

• Alliance leadership at scale: 10+ years in technology alliances, OEM or ISV partnerships, partner sales, or ecosystem leadership in enterprise infrastructure software, with a proven track record of integrations and design wins that produced significant, measurable partner-influenced revenue. You can name the deals.

• Deep OEM and ISV ecosystem experience: You have gotten a product embedded in someone else’s stack (a validated design, a reference architecture, an OEM catalog, a marketplace listing, a shipped ISV integration) and you know how to navigate a massive, matrixed organization from engineering leads and solutions architecture to GTM leadership. Direct, current relationships across hardware OEMs (Dell, HPE, Supermicro, Lenovo, Cisco), storage vendors (VAST Data, WEKA, DDN, NetApp, Pure), and infrastructure ISVs. You can name the people, not just the logos.

• AI infrastructure fluency: Working understanding of Kubernetes, cloud-native platforms, and AI/ML infrastructure, plus the GPU stack these designs are built around (DGX and NVL-class systems, networking and DPUs, schedulers, inference serving). Enough to look at an ISV’s product and tell whether the integration is thirty days of work or a quarter, and to earn credibility with architects while translating it into ROI for executives.

• Commercial construction: You can build a price book, model a royalty, and structure support and warranty flow-down that engineering and legal will both sign. You can hold your position against people who negotiate embedding agreements for a living.

• Influence without authority: Demonstrated ability to mobilize cross-functional teams (Product, Engineering, Marketing, regional sales) on both sides of an alliance, without direct organizational control. You write the acceptance criteria; you do not forward the request.

• Operating rigor and builder’s instinct: Disciplined qualification (MEDDPICC or equivalent), forecasting hygiene, and reporting discipline, paired with comfort in an ambiguous, high-velocity environment with no inherited program and no inherited team. You compress timelines rather than manage them. Taking over an established partner business and growing it is a different job; we are hiring for the build. A builder, not a caretaker.

Bonus points for:

• Prior OEM design work: History of getting software named in a server OEM’s AI infrastructure reference or validated design.

• NVIDIA partner ecosystem experience: NCP, ISV certification, or reference architecture programs.

• Open-source ecosystem credibility: CNCF standing or maintainer and contributor experience in an adjacent project, and a feel for the boundary between an open project and an embedded commercial product.

• Adjacent stack and marketplace fluency: Slurm, Ray, Run:ai, or inference serving stacks in production; cloud marketplace private offers and committed-spend drawdown across AWS, Azure, or GCP.

We're the #1 platform for AI infrastructure, trusted by the world's fastest-growing AI cloud builders. We're a venture-backed startup that's raised over $28M from top-tier investors including Khosla Ventures (first investor in OpenAI, GitLab, Stripe, and DoorDash), and we're in a hyper-growth phase looking for motivated people to join our team. Our headquarters are in San Francisco (Salesforce Tower), but our team is distributed around the globe with a remote-first culture.

We give AI Cloud providers and AI factories a hyperscaler-like experience on their own GPU infrastructure. Our platform runs the full stack an operator needs, from bare metal provisioning and node lifecycle management up through managed Kubernetes, Slurm, Ray, and inference clusters, so they can turn raw GPUs into cluster products they can sell in days instead of spending 12+ months building it themselves. Today we power over 100,000 GPUs and 1 million CPUs across 50+ AI clouds and Fortune 500 companies, backed by a team of 40+ infrastructure engineers who build alongside our customers rather than just shipping them software.

We're the company behind vCluster, the open source technology for tenant isolation on Kubernetes, with 11,000+ GitHub stars and 40M+ tenant clusters created since 2021. Open source is part of our DNA. At KubeCon North America 2025, we launched our Infrastructure Tenancy Platform for AI, a Kubernetes-native framework built for running AI, ML, and GPU-intensive workloads anywhere, with an NVIDIA-validated reference architecture for DGX systems.

Benefits

We offer the following benefits:

• Competitive Salary: We offer a competitive compensation package, including equity.

• Platinum-Level Insurance: Health, dental, vision, and life Insurance, including plans for you and eligible dependents (benefits vary depending on country).

• Flexible Working Schedule:  You have a doctor’s appointment or need to head to the supermarket to get groceries at 2pm? We won’t have an issue with that. To us, results matter more than clocking in and out at the same time every day.

• Workplace Flexibility:  We’re very flexible about where you work. We know things can change in life and we’re happy to adjust the work environment for you along the way.

At vCluster Labs, we value and stand for:

1. Make it Happen: We have a relentless bias for action and the grit to push through obstacles. We do whatever it takes to figure it out, put in the work, and ruthlessly prioritize the actions that drive measurable impact for the business.

2. Own the Outcome: We understand that our responsibility doesn't end when a task is checked off; it ends when the value is delivered. We connect our daily individual actions to the broader success of the company and our customers.

3. Create Wow: We measure success by the experience we generate, both inside and outside the company. For our customers, this means impressive speed and intuitive experiences. For our team, this means going the extra mile to support one another and to continuously drive each other to new heights.

4. Open Source, Open Mind: We are actively contributing to and maintaining open-source projects. Internally, we foster meritocracy — the strongest ideas win, no matter who or where they come from.

5. Build Tomorrow’s Standards, Intentionally: We don't just ship software; we define the state-of-the-art of tomorrow. We are fearless in tearing down old approaches to build something better, but we are disciplined in how we do it because we know our users rely on our technology to run mission-critical infrastructure platforms.