Partner Manager - GSIs

The role, in a nutshell:

We’re looking for a highly motivated strategic partner/business development professional (GSIs) who has strong market knowledge, a cloud and security network, and enjoys building relationships with key decision makers to evangelize building secure and reliable software. Our sales team walks a mile in their customers shoes and wants our customers and prospects to see the immense value and expertise Chainguard's solutions offer.

Duties and Responsibilities:

• Own the global alliance strategy and outcomes for a portfolio of top-tier Global System Integrators (GSIs), with full accountability for partner-sourced and partner-influenced pipeline, revenue impact, and long-term strategic value.
• Define and execute multi-year global alliance plans with each GSI, aligned to Chainguard’s enterprise growth priorities, including target industries, strategic accounts, solution plays, and services-led expansion motions.
• Build and maintain executive-level relationships across GSI global alliance leadership, industry practice heads, and regional executives to drive strategic alignment, sustained investment, and joint market momentum.
• Drive global opportunity creation at scale by aligning GSI go-to-market motions with Chainguard’s regional sales teams across AMER, EMEA, and APJ, ensuring consistent co-sell execution and global coverage.
• Sponsor and scale Chainguard Centers of Excellence (CoEs) within priority GSI horizontal and industry practices, enabling repeatable delivery, solution standardization, and global rollout.
• Enable GSIs to build differentiated Chainguard-powered offerings through structured enablement, reference architectures, solution validation, and inclusion in partner-led proposals, RFPs, and large-scale digital transformation programs.
• Serve as the single-threaded owner for alliance performance, tracking pipeline contribution, bookings influence, certifications, solution readiness, and executive engagement across the global relationship.
• Partner closely with internal executive stakeholders across sales, solution engineering, marketing, product, and legal to shape alliance strategy, remove execution friction, and scale partner impact.
• Establish operational rigor and forecasting discipline by maintaining accurate global pipeline and revenue visibility in SFDC and alliance dashboards, and by proactively managing risks, dependencies, and execution gaps.
• Develop deep domain expertise in cloud-native security and software supply chain risk, including SBOMs, secure-by-default platforms, compliance-driven modernization, and enterprise-scale adoption models.
• Act as a trusted strategic advisor to both Chainguard and GSI executive leadership, positioning Chainguard as a foundational component of secure platform modernization and cloud-native transformation initiatives.

Required Skills / Experience:

• 5+ years of Software Channel Manager experience required.
• Experience working with and through GSIs.
• Successful sales background required having carried and overachieved quota.
• Startup experience a plus.
• Entrepreneurial self-starter, who knows how to structure and breakdown ambiguous problems into executable steps.
• Strong verbal and written communication including high level of comfort with public speaking and excellent presentation skills.
• Excellent interpersonal skills with the ability to build rapport with a variety of groups.
• Team player and ability to work independently.
• Strong technical aptitude.
• Data, metric-driven.