Director of Strategic Partnerships
Role Overview
Vertical Compute is seeking its first Director of Strategic Partnerships to build and lead the strategic partnerships function from the ground up. This is a strategic and hands-on role at the intersection of customers, product, and R&D. The successful candidate will help ensure that potential customer needs, feedback, and expectations are clearly understood and translated into product and technology decisions.
As Vertical Compute is an ambitious hardware start-up still in an early R&D phase, this role is not yet about managing large-scale customer operations but more about shaping how the company engages with early customers, partners, and design collaborators.
Key Responsibilities
Serve as the primary point of contact for our strategic partners within the semiconductor ecosystem and other stakeholders
Build trusted, long-term relationships with early adopters and key stakeholders
Manage our EU and Government partnerships
Capture customer needs, use cases, and feedback, and translate them into clear insights for product and R&D teams
Work closely with R&D, product, and leadership to align customer expectations with technical roadmap and development priorities
Define and structure the customer relationship approach (processes, tools, communication cadence)
Work on drafting, reviewing, negotiating business contracts, identifying the first revenue stream for the company, and setting up and managing our CRM.
Support customer meetings, technical reviews, and roadmap discussions
Anticipate customer risks, concerns, and expectations in a highly innovative and evolving environment
Represent the voice of the customer internally and ensure alignment across teams
What This Role Is Not About
This is not a traditional customer support or customer success operations role
This role does not (yet) manage a large commercial portfolio or revenue pipeline, however, the focus is on relationship-building, alignment, and strategic customer engagement, not sales execution
