Strategic Partnerships Manager — GCC

ParlexAI; Dubai; Hybrid; AED 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Private medical

Equity

Learning budget

Hybrid work

Hardware on demand

Job summary

ParlexAI is building a Dubai-based GCC partnerships role focused on structuring and closing revenue-bearing agreements with banks, scheme players, and system integrators. You will own the Gulf partner portfolio and drive co‑sell motions across marketing and pre‑sales.

You will navigate multi‑vendor ecosystems across the Gulf, manage incentive models, and ensure timely delivery of integrations and certifications while traveling regionally.

Qualifications

• 6+ years in partnerships or business development in GCC payments.
• Proven ability to structure and sign agreements with partners.
• Existing relationships with scheme, processors, core-banking or banks in the Gulf.

Responsibilities

• Develop and own the partner portfolio in the Gulf: Visa CEMEA, regional processors, core‑banking and channel vendors, and systems integrators serving banks.
• Structure partnership agreements with real commercial mechanics — referral fees, revenue share, resale margin, joint pricing — and get them through both legal teams.
• Stand up co‑sell motions: named accounts, joint account plans, agreed qualification criteria, and a rhythm of pipeline reviews with each partner.
• Enable partner sellers and pre‑sales with material they can use unaccompanied, and keep it current as the product changes.
• Run joint go‑to‑market activity with marketing: launches, joint sessions at regional events, co‑branded proof points.
• Track partner‑sourced and partner‑influenced pipeline and revenue, and retire partnerships that do not produce.
• Hold Parlex to its side of partner commitments — integrations, certifications, support responses — by working across engineering, product and compliance

Skills

Partnerships

Business development

Deal structuring

Contract negotiation

GCC payments

Vendor relationships

Job description

Parlex builds Arabic-first conversational AI on top of payments infrastructure: Egyptian and Gulf dialect NLP, voice, and integrations into bank cores and card schemes. Head office is Cairo. We are standing up a Dubai entity for the GCC, and Visa's CEMEA headquarters being in Dubai is a direct reason for that decision — being in the same city as the regional scheme organisation changes what is possible.

You own partnerships in the Gulf: the scheme, the regional processors and the core‑banking and contact‑centre vendors who already sit inside the banks we want to reach. The job is to structure agreements that produce revenue, then make co‑sell and referral actually happen — partner sellers who know what to look for, joint accounts with a named owner on each side, and enablement material that a partner rep can use without us in the room.

Two things make it harder than it reads. The first is that this ecosystem does not transfer from Cairo: the scheme, processor and core‑vendor teams that cover the Gulf are different people with different mandates and their own regional targets, and a name that opens a door in Egypt carries very little in Riyadh. The second is that the region produces a lot of signed memoranda that never generate a dirham. Getting a partnership announced is not hard. Getting a partner's sales team to bring you into a live bank opportunity, repeatedly, is the whole job. You will also be doing it as the smaller party, which means you have to make your own company deliver on what you committed — engineering time, certifications, integration work — when nobody internally reports to you.

Responsibilities

• Develop and own the partner portfolio in the Gulf: Visa CEMEA, regional processors, core‑banking and channel vendors, and systems integrators serving banks
• Structure partnership agreements with real commercial mechanics — referral fees, revenue share, resale margin, joint pricing — and get them through both legal teams
• Stand up co‑sell motions: named accounts, joint account plans, agreed qualification criteria, and a rhythm of pipeline reviews with each partner
• Enable partner sellers and pre‑sales with material they can use unaccompanied, and keep it current as the product changes
• Run joint go‑to‑market activity with marketing: launches, joint sessions at regional events, co‑branded proof points
• Track partner‑sourced and partner‑influenced pipeline and revenue, and retire partnerships that do not produce
• Hold Parlex to its side of partner commitments — integrations, certifications, support responses — by working across engineering, product and compliance

Requirements

• 6+ years in partnerships or business development in GCC payments, with agreements you personally structured and signed
• Existing working relationships across the scheme, processor, core‑banking or bank ecosystem in the Gulf specifically, not relationships in another market that you expect to travel
• Deal‑structuring capability: commercial models, margin and referral mechanics, and the confidence to negotiate them as the smaller party
• Evidence of partnerships that produced revenue, with the numbers to show it
• Based in Dubai, with GCC travel
• Nice to have: prior work with or inside Visa, Mastercard or a regional processor, and experience running formal partner enablement programmes

Benefits

• Private medical cover for you and your family
• Real equity, explained in plain terms before you sign
• A learning budget, and the time to actually use it
• Hybrid working from our Cairo office, with flexibility around how you structure your week
• The hardware you ask for, not the hardware we have spare