Director, Strategic Infrastructure Partnerships
Location: Dallas, TX
Type: Direct Hire
Overview
Our client is seeking a Director of Strategic Infrastructure Partnerships to lead and expand a critical ecosystem of technology and infrastructure partners supporting high-performance computing, AI, and next-generation data center environments.
This newly created role will centralize ownership of strategic partnerships that currently span multiple teams. The Director will establish a clear partnership strategy, strengthen executive relationships with key vendors, drive commercial value, and ensure partner capabilities align with the company’s infrastructure roadmap and growth objectives.
Serving as the primary business-side owner of the partnership ecosystem, this individual will work closely with executive leadership, infrastructure, engineering, procurement, finance, product, and sales teams to develop scalable partnerships across GPU and hardware suppliers, OEMs, data center providers, networking vendors, ISVs, and channel partners.
Key Responsibilities
Strategic Partnerships
- Build, manage, and expand strategic relationships with hardware OEMs, GPU suppliers, data center and colocation providers, networking vendors, ISVs, and channel partners.
- Develop and own the strategic infrastructure partnership roadmap, aligning partner strategy with long-term business and technology objectives.
- Identify, evaluate, and prioritize new partnerships across AI infrastructure, HPC, cloud, networking, and data center ecosystems.
- Monitor emerging technologies, market trends, and competitive developments to identify new partnership opportunities.
Executive Relationship Management
- Serve as the primary business contact for key strategic partners, including executive alignment, relationship governance, escalations, and performance management.
- Create consistent structure and accountability around partner engagement across the organization.
- Partner closely with infrastructure and technical leadership to streamline communication, decision-making, and vendor coordination.
- Support partner enablement, certifications, technical training, and joint planning initiatives.
Commercial Strategy & Negotiation
- Lead commercial negotiations involving pricing, rebates, incentives, service levels, capacity commitments, and strategic agreements.
- Partner with Procurement, Legal, Finance, and Compliance on contracts, risk management, and vendor governance.
- Identify opportunities for cost optimization, vendor consolidation, improved commercial terms, and strategic sourcing efficiencies.
- Track partner performance, contractual commitments, KPIs, delivery timelines, and service-level performance.
Infrastructure Planning & Cross-Functional Leadership
- Collaborate with engineering, infrastructure, procurement, finance, product, and commercial teams to align partner capabilities with business priorities.
- Support supplier forecasting, capacity planning, hardware availability, and infrastructure deployment requirements.
- Coordinate with colocation, networking, hardware, and infrastructure partners supporting data center expansion and new deployments.
- Evaluate build, buy, and partner strategies for major infrastructure initiatives.
Go-to-Market & Ecosystem Growth
- Develop joint go-to-market initiatives, including co-selling, solution integrations, strategic marketing programs, and partner-led opportunities.
- Identify opportunities to expand the company’s market reach through strategic alliances and ecosystem relationships.
- Conduct market and competitive analysis to evaluate emerging technologies, partners, and commercial opportunities.
- Help shape the long-term partner ecosystem strategy supporting the company’s growth in AI and high-performance computing infrastructure.
Qualifications
- 8+ years of experience in strategic partnerships, business development, vendor management, strategic sourcing, or related technology infrastructure roles.
- Experience building and managing strategic partnerships within cloud infrastructure, data centers, HPC, AI infrastructure, networking, or enterprise technology.
- Strong relationships or experience working with hardware OEMs, GPU vendors, networking providers, colocation companies, or infrastructure technology partners.
- Proven experience negotiating complex enterprise commercial agreements, pricing models, rebates, SLAs, and strategic commitments.
- Understanding of AI/ML compute infrastructure, GPU environments, high-performance networking, cloud infrastructure, or data center technologies strongly preferred.
- Strong commercial and financial acumen with experience evaluating pricing, capacity, supplier performance, and partnership economics.
- Demonstrated ability to work across engineering, infrastructure, procurement, product, finance, legal, and executive leadership teams.
- Strong executive presence with the ability to manage senior-level partner relationships and complex negotiations.
- Highly analytical with the ability to evaluate market trends, vendor performance, and strategic build-versus-buy-versus-partner decisions.
- Comfortable building structure, processes, and strategy within a fast-growing and evolving organization.
- Bachelor’s degree required. MBA or advanced degree preferred.