About the role
Chainguard is the trusted source for open source. By delivering hardened, secure, and production-ready builds of all the open source software engineers and AI agents rely on, Chainguard helps organizations build faster, stay compliant, and eliminate risk. Our customers include Fortune 500 enterprises and global industry leaders, including Anduril, Canva, Fortinet, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, OpenAI, Snap Inc., and Snowflake. Chainguard is venture-backed by leading investors, including Amplify, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mantis VC, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Spark Capital.
The role, in a nutshell: We’re looking for a highly motivated strategic partner/business development professional (GSIs) who has strong market knowledge, a cloud and security network, and enjoys building relationships with key decision makers to evangelize building secure and reliable software. Our sales team walks a mile in their customers shoes and wants our customers and prospects to see the immense value and expertise Chainguard's solutions offer. Duties and
Responsibilities: Own the global alliance strategy and outcomes for a portfolio of top-tier Global System Integrators (GSIs), with full accountability for partner-sourced and partner-influenced pipeline, revenue impact, and long-term strategic value. Define and execute multi-year global alliance plans with each GSI, aligned to Chainguard’s enterprise growth priorities, including target industries, strategic accounts, solution plays, and services-led expansion motions. Build and maintain executive-level relationships across GSI global alliance leadership, industry practice heads, and regional executives to drive strategic alignment, sustained investment, and joint market momentum. Drive global opportunity creation at scale by aligning GSI go-to-market motions with Chainguard’s regional sales teams across AMER, EMEA, and APJ, ensuring consistent co-sell execution and global coverage. Sponsor and scale Chainguard Centers of Excellence (CoEs) within priority GSI horizontal and industry practices, enabling repeatable delivery, solution standardization, and global rollout. Enable GSIs to build differentiated Chainguard-powered offerings through structured enablement, reference architectures, solution validation, and inclusion in partner-led proposals, RFPs, and large-scale digital transformation programs. Serve as the single-threaded owner for alliance performance, tracking pipeline contribution, bookings influence, certifications, solution readiness, and executive engagement across the global relationship. Partner closely with internal executive stakeholders across sales, solution engineering, marketing, product, and legal to shape alliance strategy, remove execution friction, and scale partner impact. Establish operational rigor and forecasting discipline by maintaining accurate global pipeline and revenue visibility in SFDC and alliance dashboards, and by proactively managing risks, dependencies, and execution gaps. Develop deep domain expertise in cloud-native security and software supply chain risk, including SBOMs, secure-by-default platforms, compliance-driven modernization, and enterprise-scale adoption models. Act as a trusted strategic advisor to both Chainguard and GSI executive leadership, positioning Chainguard as a foundational component of secure platform modernization and cloud-native transformation initiatives. Required Skills / Experience: 5+ years of Software Channel Manager experience required. Experience working with and through GSIs. Successful sales background required having carried and overachieved quota. Startup experience a plus. Entrepreneurial self-starter, who knows how to structure and breakdown ambiguous problems into executable steps. Strong verbal and written communication including high level of comfort with public speaking and excellent presentation skills. Excellent interpersonal skills with the ability to build rapport with a variety of groups. Team player and ability to work independently. Strong technical aptitude. Data, metric-driven.