---
title: 'Strategic Partnerships Lead at Vercel'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-partnerships-lead-vercel-san-francisco-9qbj358k9zc1'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-12'
---

# Strategic Partnerships Lead at Vercel

- **Company:** Vercel
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA / New York, NY / Austin, TX
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-09-11
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-12
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/vercel/jobs/6188898004

## Job description

About Vercel:

Vercel is the agentic infrastructure company. We free people and agents to ship what’s next.

For more than a decade, Vercel has shaped how the web is built. As the team behind Next.js, v0, and AI SDK, we create products that help builders move from idea to production with speed, security, and exceptional developer experience.

Now, software is entering a new era, and the next generation of products will not just be used by people. They will be built, extended, and operated by agents.

We are building the platform for that future, trusted by companies like OpenAI, PayPal, Ramp, Supreme, and millions of developers worldwide. Whether you’re building our products, supporting our customers, growing our community, or shaping our story, you’ll help define what comes next.

## About the role

Vercel is hiring a Strategic Partnerships Lead to develop first-of-a-kind partnerships that inflect the company's growth. Done well, these partnerships open distribution for our products, create new pipeline for our field teams, and/or add new capabilities to our platform. This is a highly cross-functional and technical role: you will spend as much time with product and engineering leaders as with commercial ones, both with partners and with Vercelians.

You will report to the Head of Strategic Partnerships and own a named set of partners that includes hyperscalers, frontier AI labs, silicon vendors, and commerce and enterprise software platforms. The work takes a different shape with each one, but the common thread is that these partnerships live close to the product: embedding Vercel inside a partner's platform, co-building new products, taking a joint offering to enterprises that neither company could sell alone. Structuring a deal means both understanding the technical components well enough to know what a partnership makes possible and understanding what the business impact could be if done successfully.

We expect candidates to demonstrate significant experience delivering complex deal work, creating and driving strategy, working with cross-functional teams to launch new initiatives, and initiating first-of-a-kind partnerships. We are looking for someone with a strong sense of ownership who performs at a senior level and does their best work with limited direction.

This is a hybrid position, requiring 3 days per week in one of our San Francisco, Austin, or New York City offices.

## What you will do

- Own a named set of strategic partners end to end, from first conversation through signed agreement to launch and growth
- Identify and develop new partnerships with the companies that matter most to Vercel's strategy across AI, cloud, commerce, and enterprise software
- Build the business case: size the opportunity, scope the product and engineering investment it requires, and give leadership a clear recommendation, including when the recommendation is to pass
- Lead negotiations end to end, structuring commercial agreements that are new to Vercel and often new to the partner: revenue share, embedded pricing, co-sell commitments, marketplace terms
- Develop senior relationships on the partner side and bring Vercel executives in where the relationship calls for it
- Lead cross-functional teams across Product, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Finance, and Legal to take a signed agreement to launch
- Advise Vercel leadership on where the ecosystem is moving and what it means for our roadmap
- Run deals with structure: clear milestones, agreed measures of success on both sides, and the judgment to stop the ones that are not working

## About you

- 8+ years developing, negotiating, and executing complex commercial agreements, ideally at a platform, infrastructure, cloud, or developer tools company
- A track record of initiating partnerships that had no precedent, with companies significantly larger than your own. You can walk through the terms you won and the ones you gave up
- Experience structuring deals with significant technical surface area: platform integrations, embedded or whitelabeled product, licensing, infrastructure and compute commitments. You can hold a credible conversation with a partner's product and engineering teams about agents, inference, model routing, and cloud infrastructure
- Experience creating and driving strategy, and getting an organization to fund it
- Comfortable leading cross-functional teams you do not manage, through Product, Engineering, Legal, Finance, and Sales
- Strong agency and comfort with ambiguity. You decide what to work on and can defend the choice
- Speed. You move quickly and decisively, and you keep large deals from stalling
- Excellent written and verbal communication with executives on both sides of the table

Bonus if you

- Have done partnerships at or with a hyperscaler, a frontier AI lab, or a large commerce or enterprise software platform
- Have structured technology licensing, OEM, or embedded distribution agreements
- Started in a technical role (engineering, solutions architecture, or technical product) before moving into commercial work

Benefits:

- Competitive compensation package, including equity.
- Inclusive Healthcare Package.
- Learn and Grow - we provide mentorship and send you to events that help you build your network and skills.
- Flexible Time Off.
- We will provide you the gear you need to do your role, and a WFH budget for you to outfit your space as needed.

The San Francisco, CA base pay range for this role is $XXX,XXX.XX - $XXX,XXX.XX. Actual salary will be based on job-related skills, experience, and location. Compensation outside of San Francisco may be adjusted based on employee location. The total compensation package may include benefits, equity-based compensation, and eligibility for a company bonus or variable pay program depending on the role. Your recruiter can share more details during the hiring process.

Vercel is committed to fostering and empowering an inclusive community within our organization. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, national origin, citizenship, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Vercel encourages everyone to apply for our available positions, even if they don't necessarily check every box on the job description.

## About Vercel

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Vercel provides cloud infrastructure, developer tools, and frameworks (including Next.js) for building and deploying websites and applications.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series F, September 2025)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2015 (as ZEIT; rebranded to Vercel in April 2020)
- **Founders**: Guillermo Rauch

## Core Business
- **Primary industries**: Edge computing, web hosting, content delivery network, developer tools
- **Target customers**: B2B – developers, engineering teams, enterprises, and startups building modern web applications
- **Mission / Purpose**: “Agentic infrastructure for every app and agent” — enabling humans and AI to build software together (from [vercel.com/about](https://vercel.com/about))

## Products & Services
- **Next.js**: Open-source React framework for building full-stack web applications (created and maintained by Vercel).
- **Vercel Edge Network**: Global edge infrastructure for serverless compute, static hosting, and dynamic rendering.
- **v0 (AI web development tool)**: Generates front-end code from natural language prompts; winner of a 2025 Webby Award.
- **AI SDK**: Open-source library for building conversational streaming interfaces in JavaScript/TypeScript.
- **Turborepo**: Monorepo build system (acquired in Dec 2021).
- **Fluid (infrastructure model)**: Allows instances to handle multiple concurrent requests like traditional servers while retaining serverless elasticity (introduced 2025).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: $9.3 billion (Series F, September 2025)
- **Total Funding**: ~$652 million (Series C $102M in June 2021, $250M in May 2024 at $3.25B valuation, $300M Series F in Sep 2025)
- **Key Metric**: ~900 employees (as of 2026), growing from ~550 in 2025
- **Notable Investors & Partners**: Accel, GIC (co-led Series F); angel investors include Nat Friedman (former GitHub CEO), Jordan Walke (React creator), Naval Ravikant, and others (from [vercel.com/about](https://vercel.com/about))
- **Growth Signals**: Rapid valuation growth ($3.25B to $9.3B in ~16 months); acquisitions of NuxtLabs (Jul 2025), Tremor (Jan 2025), Splitbee (Oct 2022); appointment of Mitchell Hashimoto (HashiCorp co-founder) to board in Mar 2026.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Next.js ecosystem dominance**: Extensive adoption; Vercel controls the most popular React framework, creating a strong lock-in for deployment.
- **Composable architecture**: MACH Alliance member; supports Git-based workflows, serverless, and edge functions.
- **AI-native product suite**: v0 and AI SDK provide unique capabilities for developer productivity and conversational UI.
- **Fast innovation cycle**: Ship-fast culture backed by high funding and strong engineering talent.

## Strategic Focus
- **Agentic infrastructure**: Building the platform where both humans and AI agents build, deploy, and scale software.
- **AI integration**: Deepening capabilities of v0, AI SDK, and AI Gateway; automated infrastructure improvements.
- **Enterprise adoption**: Appointing board members with enterprise experience; expanding sales and partner roles.
- **Fluid model**: Evolving serverless to handle stateful, long-running workloads.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Engineer-driven, ship-fast ethos; 75% of Glassdoor reviewers recommend to a friend; overall rating 4.1/5.0 as of 2026 ([jobsbyculture.com](https://jobsbyculture.com/blog/working-at-vercel-2026))
- **Work model**: Remote-first (U.S. roles also in San Francisco, New York City, Austin); distributed across 54% U.S., 8% U.K., 5% Germany, etc. ([LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/vercel))
- **Compensation**: Typical engineering range $180k–$320k (senior roles); benefits and equity are competitive (from [jobsbyculture.com](https://jobsbyculture.com/blog/working-at-vercel-2026))
- **Engineering quality**: High bar for talent; known alumni go to top AI/cloud companies; strong open-source contributions (Next.js, Turborepo, AI SDK)
- **Recent departures do not diminish growth**: Despite some leadership changes (e.g., Head of Mobile left Mar 2026, Director of Commercial Sales left Apr 2026), the company continues to hire heavily (94 active postings as of mid-2026, +2.2% YoY) ([LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/vercel))

## Sources
1. [wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vercel)
2. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/vercel)
3. [vercel.com/about](https://vercel.com/about)
4. [vercel.com/careers](https://vercel.com/careers)
5. [jobsbyculture.com](https://jobsbyculture.com/blog/working-at-vercel-2026)

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