Partner Manager, AI Native Ecosystems

Customer.io; United States; Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for you and family

16 weeks parental leave

Unlimited PTO

Remote work stipend

Job summary

Customer.io is seeking a Partner Manager for AI Native Ecosystems to lead platform partnerships across top AI tooling ecosystems. Based in North America, you will negotiate terms, scope integrations with engineering, and drive listings and feature opportunities in partner marketplaces.

You'll work cross-functionally with product, engineering, marketing, and legal to ensure successful collaborations. The role emphasizes action, technical fluency, and marketplace-driven growth.

Qualifications

• 5-7 years in business development, partnerships, or platform/ecosystem roles in developer tools or marketplaces.
• Track record of getting products listed and adopted in another platform's ecosystem.
• Fluent with APIs, webhooks, OAuth; comfortable with CLI discussions and scoping with engineers.
• Strong deal-making instincts for revenue share, co-marketing, and referrals.
• Bias to action in an undefined category and comfort with product-led growth models.
• Based in North America and able to operate cross-functionally with product, eng, marketing, and legal.
• Excellent cross-functional operator with collaboration across teams.

Responsibilities

• Own the partner relationship lifecycle from outreach to signed agreement and shipped integration.
• Negotiate commercial terms (revenue share, co-marketing, marketplace listing requirements).
• Translate marketplace requirements into specs and work with engineers to scope integrations.
• Get Customer.io listed, verified, and ideally featured across marketplaces and directories.
• Track installs, activations, and pipeline; report on partnerships' impact and ROI.
• Build repeatable criteria and playbooks for evaluating and onboarding new platforms.

Skills

Deal negotiation

Cross-functional collaboration

Technical fluency

Partner relationship management

Strategic thinking

Market awareness

Job description

Over 9,000 companies — from scrappy startups to global brands — use our platform to send billions of emails, push notifications, in-app messages, and SMS every day. Customer.io powers automated communication that people actually want to receive. We help teams send smarter, more relevant messages using real-time behavioral data.

About the role

Hi, my name is Marc, VP of Global Partnerships at Customer.io . A new wave of AI SaaS builders - Lovable, Vercel, Cursor, Bolt, and others - is becoming the default starting point for how software gets built, and each one is standing up its own marketplace or integration directory to connect what people build inside them to real backend services.

I'm hiring a Partner Manager, AI Native Ecosystems to make Customer.io the obvious, pre-integrated messaging and engagement layer for everything built on these platforms. This role sits at the intersection of business development and technical integration work: part of the job is identifying and recruiting the right platforms and negotiating partnership terms; the other part is working hands-on with our Product team to scope and ship the actual integration required to get listed and featured.

AI builder platforms are becoming a new front door for software creation - and a new distribution channel for infrastructure providers. Getting Customer.io natively integrated and well-positioned across this ecosystem now, while the partner programs and technical standards are still forming, is a land-grab opportunity. This role owns that land-grab end to end.

What we value

• Bias to Action: comfortable building the process, not just executing an existing one - these marketplaces and their rules are new and changing monthly.
• Cross-Functional Fluency: equally credible in a deal negotiation and a technical scoping conversation with engineers.
• Ownership: drives a relationship from first contact through signed agreement through shipped integration, without waiting to be handed the next step.
• Resourcefulness: comfortable operating without a dominant brand - you're earning the meeting, not getting it by default.

What you’ll do

• Immediate priority: optimize our existing Claude and ChatGPT integrations, including MCP discoverability and GEO (making sure Customer.io shows up when AI tools recommend a messaging/engagement platform).
• Identify and prioritize which AI builder platforms (Vercel, Cursor, Lovable, Bolt, Google, AWS, and others) are worth partnering with, working with Engineering, Design, and Product to assess technical feasibility and distribution potential, including CLI and MCP connector priorities.
• Own the full partner relationship lifecycle - outbound, negotiation, and ongoing management - from first contact through signed agreement through shipped integration.
• Negotiate commercial terms (revenue share, co-marketing, marketplace listing requirements) directly with partner and BD counterparts.
• Translate each marketplace's technical requirements into a spec and work hands-on with our engineering team to scope and ship the integration - you don't need to write the integration yourself, but you need to be fluent enough to unblock it.
• Get Customer.io listed, verified, and ideally featured in each platform's marketplace or directory, and manage the relationship as review guidelines and requirements evolve.
• Track installs, activations, and pipeline sourced from each marketplace; report on which partnerships are driving real usage versus which need renegotiation or deprioritization.
• Build the playbook as you go - there's no existing process for this at Customer.io yet, and part of the job is creating repeatable criteria (target criteria, technical requirements checklist, deal template) so new platforms can be evaluated and onboarded quickly.

What we're looking for

• 5-7 years in business development, partnerships, or platform/ecosystem roles, ideally with a developer tools, API-first, or marketplace-driven product. If you're a bit outside that range but have shipped something into a marketplace or app store, we still want to hear from you.
• A track record of getting a product listed and adopted inside another platform's ecosystem - app stores, marketplaces, or integration directories (e.g., Shopify App Store, Salesforce AppExchange, Zapier, Segment Connections, or comparable).
• Real technical fluency: you can read API and webhook documentation, understand OAuth and auth scopes, are comfortable discussing CLI tooling, and hold your own in a scoping conversation with engineers.
• Strong deal-making instincts - comfortable structuring revenue share, co-marketing, and referral agreements, and negotiating directly with partner and BD counterparts.
• Bias to action in an undefined category - these marketplaces and their rules are new and changing monthly, and this role is as much about building the process as executing it.
• An understanding of self-serve, product-led growth motions - the platforms you'll be partnering with cater primarily to small business end-customers rather than enterprise buyers, so you should be comfortable positioning Customer.io for that audience.
• Based in North America.
• Excellent cross-functional operator - you'll work closely with product, engineering, marketing, and legal to get each partnership over the line.

We believe in transparency. This role offers a total on-target earnings (OTE) of $166,250-$200,000 USD (or equivalent in local currency), on an 80/20 base/variable split, subject to market rate adjustment.

We know our people are what make us great, and we’re committed to taking great care of them. Our inclusive benefits package supports your well-being and growth, including 100% coverage of medical, dental, vision, mental health, and supplemental insurance premiums for you and your family. We also offer 16 weeks paid parental leave, unlimited PTO, stipends for remote work and wellness, a professional development budget, and more.

No gotchas, no trick questions - just a clear, human process designed to help both