The posting
As Sr. Director, VAR & Channel Partnerships at vCluster Labs, you aren’t just signing reseller agreements; you are building and leading the global partner channel that lets the world’s AI infrastructure resellers sell tenant isolation without us in the room.
Enterprises do not buy AI infrastructure one product at a time. They buy it from the reseller who already holds the paper, the services capacity, and the trust. Your first targets are the partners where our path to the money is right now: WWT and Computacenter, then SHI, CDW, and the national and regional VARs that actually sell AI infrastructure. You can pull in distributors, and the OEM and ISV partners your peers own, where they accelerate a deal; the global system integrators (Accenture, Deloitte, EY) stay with the VP.
This is a founding, zero-to-one role on a first-year partner program. You start as an individual contributor: there is no channel to inherit, and you will carry the first partners and the first number yourself. As the channel proves out, you will hire and lead the team that scales it globally. Success is measured in partner-sourced bookings, transacting partners, and registered deals that close. Not in logos signed.
As Sr. Director, VAR & Channel Partnerships, your role will include:
- Global partner leadership: You will own vCluster’s global VAR and channel partnerships end to end: the strategy, the executive relationships, and the commercial results. You will be vCluster’s senior voice with partner leadership across North America, EMEA, and APJ, and you will decide where we invest and where we do not.
- Recruitment and activation: You will recruit against a filter, not for coverage. A short list of VARs who can actually source AI infrastructure and platform engineering deals beats a long list who cannot. You will own the path from first conversation to first transaction: agreement, track admission, enablement, first registered deal, and first close. You will also retire non-performing partners without drama. Time from signature to first dollar is your headline metric.
- Transaction mechanics: You will own the partner commercial model: tier discounts, deal-registration uplift, renewal margin, volume incentives, and named-account bonuses. You will run deal registration and Partner of Record, including regional PoR, active-engagement standards, renewal rights, and conflict resolution that holds up when two partners claim the same account. You will build distribution where it scales the motion, while keeping the quoting and order path clean enough that partners do not route around it.
- Field alignment: You will make co-sell comp-neutral so our sellers get full quota credit and never fight the channel. You will build named-account maps between vCluster sellers and partner sellers, with deal registration the field trusts. You will give partner sellers a reason to lead with vCluster: margin they can count on, services attach they can sell, and a technical story their SEs can carry.
- Multi-party plays with the ecosystem: You will connect VAR opportunities to the NVIDIA alliance and the OEM and ISV design wins your peers land, so a WWT or Computacenter seller can quote a validated stack with vCluster already inside it. Where a distributor accelerates a deal, you bring them in.
- Enablement, marketing, and MDF: You will own sales and technical certification for your partners and hold the tier requirements. You will run joint marketing with pipeline objectives attached: field events, webinars, named-account campaigns, and customer stories. You will approve MDF against pipeline outcomes and enforce proof of performance. Discretionary spend earns its return or it stops.
- Building the team: You will design the channel organization: the roles, the hiring sequence, and the coverage model by region and partner tier. As partner revenue grows, you will hire and lead partner managers and partner engineers, starting with the roles that unlock the most revenue.
- Owning the channel number: You will run MEDDPICC on every partner-attached opportunity and inspect pipeline weekly. Partner attribution is queryable from day one; pipeline we cannot query is pipeline we do not have. QBRs run on a fixed cadence with a fixed agenda: bookings against plan, named-account inspection, certification status, marketing execution, renewal health, and the forward-quarter plan. This is a first-year partner program with team MBOs and OKRs. You report your KPIs without being asked: transacting partners, sourced and attached pipeline and bookings, registration volume and win rate, certified resources, and MDF return.
This role could be a fit for you if you bring:
- Channel leadership with a number behind it: 8+ years in channel, reseller, or partner sales in infrastructure software, AI infrastructure, or cloud. You have a record of building a partner channel from early stage to producing revenue, ideally across more than one region: partners recruited, activated, and transacting, with the bookings to show for it. You can name the partners you activated and the revenue they produced.
- Executive partner relationships: Direct, current relationships with leadership at national and regional VARs, not just their field teams. That means WWT, Computacenter, SHI, CDW, Insight, Presidio, AHEAD, ePlus, Connection, Softcat, Mark III, and Pacific Teck. You have the depth to open a conversation in your first week. You know which partners actually sell AI infrastructure and which ones talk about it, and how a VAR makes money and how its sellers get paid. You know what has to be true for a rep to lead with your product instead of the one they already know.
- Channel mechanics: Working command of tier and discount structures, deal registration, Partner of Record, renewal rights, distribution, and MDF governance. You can defend a discount structure, resolve a channel conflict without losing either partner, and tell a partner no.
- AI infrastructure fluency: Working understanding of Kubernetes, cloud-native architecture, and GPU and AI infrastructure. Enough depth to earn credibility with a partner SE, and enough range to translate it into margin and services opportunity for their leadership.
- Builder of teams as well as channels: You are comfortable starting as a player with no team underneath you. You have hired and led partner managers or channel teams before, or you are clearly ready to, and you know which hire comes first and why.
- Influence without authority: Proven ability to mobilize sales, marketing, legal, and enablement teams on both sides of a partnership without direct organizational control. You write the program terms; you do not forward the ask.
- Operating rigor and a builder’s instinct: Disciplined qualification (MEDDPICC or equivalent), forecast hygiene, and reporting discipline. You pair this with comfort in an ambiguous, high-velocity environment with no inherited program. You compress timelines rather than manage them. Running an established channel is a different job; we are hiring for the build. A builder, not a caretaker.
Bonus points for:
- NVIDIA partner ecosystem experience, including NCP and reseller-facing programs
- Distribution experience with Arrow, TD SYNNEX, Ingram Micro, or regional equivalents
- Channel experience across EMEA and APJ as well as North America
- Public sector, sovereign, or regulated-industry channel experience
- Open-source commercial model experience: how a channel sells against a free tier
ABOUT VCLUSTER LABS
We're the #1 platform for AI infrastructure, trusted by the world's fastest-growing AI cloud builders. We're a venture-backed startup that's raised over $28M from top-tier investors including Khosla Ventures (first investor in OpenAI, GitLab, Stripe, and DoorDash), and we're in a hyper-growth phase looking for motivated people to join our team. Our headquarters are in San Francisco (Salesforce Tower), but our team is distributed around the globe with a remote-first culture.
We give AI Cloud providers and AI factories a hyperscaler-like experience on their own GPU infrastructure. Our platform runs the full stack an operator needs, from bare metal provisioning and node lifecycle management up through managed Kubernetes, Slurm, Ray, and inference clusters, so they can turn raw GPUs into cluster products they can sell in days instead of spending 12+ months building it themselves. Today we power over 100,000 GPUs and 1 million CPUs across 50+ AI clouds and Fortune 500 companies, backed by a team of 40+ infrastructure engineers who build alongside our customers rather than just shipping them software.
We're the company behind vCluster, the open source technology for tenant isolation on Kubernetes, with 11,000+ GitHub stars and 40M+ tenant clusters created since 2021. Open source is part of our DNA. At KubeCon North America 2025, we launched our Infrastructure Tenancy Platform for AI, a Kubernetes-native framework built for running AI, ML, and GPU-intensive workloads anywhere, with an NVIDIA-validated reference architecture for DGX systems.
Benefits
We offer the following benefits:
- Competitive Salary: We offer a competitive compensation package, including equity.
- Premium Insurance: Health, dental, vision, and life Insurance, including plans for you and eligible dependents (benefits vary depending on country).
- Flexible Working Schedule: You have a doctor’s appointment or need to head to the supermarket to get groceries at 2pm? We won’t have an issue with that. To us, results matter more than clocking in and out at the same time every day.
- Workplace Flexibility: We’re very flexible about where you work. We know things can change in life and we’re happy to adjust the work environment for you along the way.
CULTURE & VALUES
At vCluster Labs, we value and stand for:
1. Make it Happen: We have a relentless bias for action and the grit to push through obstacles. We do whatever it takes to figure it out, put in the work, and ruthlessly prioritize the actions that drive measurable impact for the business.
2. Own the Outcome: We understand that our responsibility doesn't end when a task is checked off; it ends when the value is delivered. We connect our daily individual actions to the broader success of the company and our customers.
3. Create Wow: We measure success by the experience we generate, both inside and outside the company. For our customers, this means impressive speed and intuitive experiences. For our team, this means going the extra mile to support one another and to continuously drive each other to new heights.
4. Open Source, Open Mind: We are actively contributing to and maintaining open-source projects. Internally, we foster meritocracy — the strongest ideas win, no matter who or where they come from.
5. Build Tomorrow’s Standards, Intentionally: We don't just ship software; we define the state-of-the-art of tomorrow. We are fearless in tearing down old approaches to build something better, but we are disciplined in how we do it because we know our users rely on our technology to run mission-critical infrastructure platforms.
