Strategic Partnerships Lead

Forus; New York (NY); On-site; USD 200,000 - 270,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity for full-time employees

Unlimited paid time off

Fully covered health insurance

Lunch and dinner provided at the office

Job summary

Forus in New York, NY is seeking a Strategic Partnerships Lead to develop and manage partnerships across the healthcare ecosystem. You will spearhead efforts with payers, pharmacies, and other key organizations to enhance medication access.

The role demands 7–12 years of experience in partnerships or business development, along with the ability to navigate complex relationships effectively. Compensation includes a competitive salary of $200K-$270K and comprehensive benefits.

Qualifications

• 7–12 years of experience in healthcare partnerships or business development.
• Deep understanding of the healthcare ecosystem and medication access.
• Familiarity structuring complex partnerships across various considerations.

Responsibilities

• Develop partnership strategy with healthcare organizations.
• Identify relationships that meaningfully accelerate growth.
• Build trusted relationships with senior leaders across healthcare.
• Coordinate internal teams to translate external opportunities.

Skills

Healthcare partnerships

Business development

Strong communication

Relationship building

Job description

About Forus

Forus is building an AI‑powered network that connects doctors, pharmacies, payers, and biopharma to accelerate new science to patients. Our platform automates the complexity between a doctor prescribing a medicine and a patient starting treatment, including insurance coverage, financial assistance, and supply chain navigation. We provide this support free to doctors and patients, helping them get life‑changing medicine faster, cheaper, and easier. The resulting network enables biopharma companies to design better research, launch new drugs more effectively, and invest in harder‑to‑treat conditions.

• Accelerating scale: We already support patients across more than 80% of ZIP codes and partner with 5 of the 10 largest biopharma companies in the world.
• AI‑native, durable model: Our business becomes stronger as AI improves, as every new doctor, patient, and partner makes the network more valuable.
• Backing to build for the long term: We raised $160M+ from leading investors to build an exceptional team and unlock the full scale of the opportunity.

Our number one priority is scaling to market demand.

About The Role

As Strategic Partnerships Lead at Forus, you will build the relationships that allow us to operate and scale across the complex infrastructure surrounding medication access. You will work with payers, PBMs, pharmacies, wholesalers, GPOs, and other relevant industry organizations.

Location: New York, NY (full‑time, in‑person).

You will determine which relationships can materially accelerate our growth, expand our capabilities, or remove barriers for providers and patients, then own those partnerships from initial strategy through execution. This is not a traditional business‑development role focused on accumulating partnerships; success means creating durable strategic value through commercial agreements, integrations, operating coordination, data exchange, and broader ecosystem alignment.

What You Will Do

• Develop Forus’ partnership strategy across payers, PBMs, pharmacies, wholesalers, GPOs, and other healthcare organizations.
• Identify the external relationships that can most meaningfully accelerate growth, improve medication access, expand product capabilities, or reduce strategic risk.
• Build trusted relationships with senior leaders across complex and highly matrixed healthcare organizations.
• Develop a deep understanding of each partner’s incentives, priorities, and constraints, and use that understanding to structure mutually valuable relationships.
• Own partnerships end‑to‑end, including sourcing, strategic assessment, negotiation, implementation, governance, and expansion.
• Coordinate across product, engineering, operations, commercial, legal, and leadership teams to translate external opportunities into executed outcomes.
• Represent Forus externally and help establish the company as a trusted and consequential participant in the healthcare ecosystem.

Qualifications

• 7–12 years of experience in healthcare partnerships, business development, investing, strategy, consulting, or an operating role involving complex external relationships.
• Deep understanding of the healthcare ecosystem, ideally including payers, PBMs, pharmacies, wholesalers, health technology infrastructure, or medication access.
• Familiarity structuring partnerships that span commercial, technical, operational, regulatory, and legal considerations.
• Strong written and verbal communication that allows you to be an effective participant in both internal debates and external relationships.
• Track record of moving quickly, finding shortcuts, and going to unreasonable lengths to deliver on goals.
• High NPS with your former teammates.

Working With Us

• Our team works in a high‑trust, high‑autonomy environment that requires competency and alignment with our principles.
• Do the math. Be rigorous, assume nothing. Break problems down and reason from the ground up.
• Expand the solution space. Be resourceful and audacious. Resist false constraints and push beyond the obvious before committing.
• Spit it out. Speak directly, invite critique, avoid equivocation. We want right answers, not comfortable ones.
• Raise the bar together. Hold a high standard for execution, push each other directly, and win as a team.

Compensation & Benefits

• Competitive base salary ($200K‑$270K) with meaningful equity for full‑time employees.
• Fully covered medical, vision, and dental insurance.
• Memberships for One Medical, Talkspace, Teladoc, and Kindbody.
• Unlimited paid time off (PTO) and 16 weeks of parental leave.
• 401K plan setup, FSA option, commuter benefits, and DashPass.
• Lunch at the office every day and dinner at the office after 7 pm.

Our salary ranges are based on paying competitively for our company’s size and industry, and are one part of the total compensation package that also includes equity, benefits, and other opportunities at Forus (for full‑time employees). Individual pay decisions are ultimately based on a number of factors, including qualifications for the role, experience level, skillset, geography, and balancing internal equity.

Forus is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, national origin, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related condition, or any other basis protected by law.