Sr. Director, APAC Partnerships & Ecosystems

About this role

As the Sr. Director, APAC Partnerships & Ecosystems at vCluster Labs, you aren’t just managing a channel; you are building our entire route to market in the region from scratch. Almost every AI Factory in Asia Pacific is sold through a partner, and there is no partner team in APAC today. You will be that team. You’ll sign the partners already selling AI Factories, turn them into pipeline our AEs accept and close, and own the number that comes with it. The pipeline you build pays for the next hires on your team.

As the Sr. Director, APAC Partnerships & Ecosystems, your role will include:

- Partner recruitment and executive relationships: You’ll use your existing network to recruit and activate the top SIs, MSPs, VARs, OEMs and distributors across ASEAN, Japan, Korea, India and ANZ, along with NVIDIA’s regional and country teams. You’ll keep the portfolio small and go deep with each partner. Every one gets a signed agreement, a joint business plan with targets you both sign, and sellers who are enabled to sell vCluster.

- Distribution and the MSP route: You’ll set up two-tier distribution through TD SYNNEX or a regional distributor, covering pricing and margin, services attach, deal registration, MDF and onboarding. MSPs and VARs will transact through it, and you’ll get vCluster and vMetal onto the OEM and NVIDIA reference configurations that partners sell in the region.

- Co-sell and multi-party pursuits: You’ll run account mapping and joint pipeline with our AEs, and adapt the AI Factory Blueprint and Sovereign AI Infrastructure plays to each market. You’ll lead pursuits where an SI or MSP brings NVIDIA, the OEM, storage and vCluster together for one customer. POCs are time-boxed with written success criteria, and every pursuit has one partner of record.

- Partner enablement: You’ll build sales, technical and go-to-market enablement that scales: plays, training, certifications and demo environments. You’ll also create an APAC partner playbook that partner sellers actually use. On the first call for any opportunity, you’ll confirm the tenancy model with Partner Solutions Engineering. Private nodes back every external, customer-facing service.

- Forecast and operating rhythm: Every Monday you’ll review partner performance, pipeline and forecast using MEDDPICC. You’ll call each deal commit, likely or stretch, act quickly when something slips, and keep a scorecard the CEO can read in five minutes.

- The voice of APAC in product: You’ll bring regional requirements back to product, such as data residency, sovereign security standards, local support, and regional hardware and network vendors. You’ll also help win a sovereign or telco AI Factory with a partner and publish it as a joint reference.

This role could be a fit for you if you bring:

- APAC partner leadership: 12+ years in partner, channel or alliances roles in infrastructure software, cloud, IaaS or AI, with 5+ of those years covering APAC. You’ve driven cloud or IaaS revenue through partners and opened a region or partner motion from zero. Be ready to name the deals you sourced yourself.

- A network you can use today: You have current relationships across APAC SIs, MSPs, VARs and distributors, plus NVIDIA regional teams and at least one server OEM (Dell, HPE or Supermicro).

- Hands-on program building: You’ve built two-tier distribution and MSP programs yourself, including margin structures, deal registration, MDF and services attach.

- How AI infrastructure gets bought in the region: You know the procurement cycles, local partner requirements, and government and regulated-industry expectations at AI Clouds, telcos and sovereign AI programs.

- Enough technical depth to be credible: You understand cloud infrastructure well, with depth in GPU, HPC, Kubernetes or bare metal. That’s enough to hold your own with partner architects and turn what you learn into a CFO business case.

- Forecasting discipline and autonomy: You qualify with MEDDPICC or an equivalent, forecast cleanly, and work on your own across time zones with a US-based leadership team. You communicate well with executives in fluent English.

Bonus points for:

- Languages: Japanese, Korean or Mandarin.

- Reference configurations: You’ve gotten a software product onto an OEM or NVIDIA reference architecture.

- Sovereign or telco wins: You’ve closed a sovereign AI or telco AI Factory deal through a partner.

Location and travel: Singapore, Korea, Japan or another major APAC market. We’re flexible for the right person. Expect up to 40% travel across the region, plus NVIDIA GTC, SC, KubeCon and regional AI infrastructure events. Reports to the VP, Worldwide Partnerships & Ecosystems

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…