Sr. Global Alliance Director, Channel and GSI

About this role

As Director Global Alliance Leader at vCluster Labs, you aren’t just signing reseller agreements; you are building the 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 GSIs, ISVs, and distributors where they accelerate a reseller deal; the global system integrators (Accenture, Deloitte, EY) stay with the VP. (Internally titled Director, Alliances, Channel & VARs)

This is a founding, zero-to-one role on a first-year partner program. There is no channel to inherit and no team underneath you. Success is measured in partner-sourced bookings, transacting partners, and registered deals that close. Not in logos signed.

As Sr. Global Alliance Director, Channel and GSI, your role will include:

- 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, first close) and retire non-performing partners without drama. Time from signature to first dollar is your headline metric.

- Transaction mechanics: You will own the reseller commercial model: tier discounts, deal-registration uplift, renewal margin, volume incentives, and named-account bonuses. You will run deal registration and Partner of Record (regional PoR, active-engagement standards, renewal rights, and conflict resolution that holds up when two partners claim the same account), and 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, and 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 reseller 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 GSI, ISV, or distributor accelerates a reseller 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, customer stories) and approve MDF against pipeline outcomes with proof of performance enforced. Discretionary spend earns its return or it stops.

- Owning the channel number: MEDDPICC on every partner-attached opportunity. Weekly pipeline inspection. Partner attribution queryable from day one; pipeline we cannot query is pipeline we do not have. QBRs on a fixed cadence with a fixed agenda: bookings against plan, named-account inspection, certification status, marketing execution, renewal health, 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, 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, with a demonstrable record of building a reseller channel from early stage to producing revenue: partners recruited, activated, and transacting, with the bookings to show for it. You can name the partners you activated and the revenue they produced.

- Deep VAR ecosystem experience: Direct, current relationships across national and regional VARs and infrastructure resellers (WWT, Computacenter, SHI, CDW, Insight, Presidio, AHEAD, ePlus, Connection, Softcat, Mark III, Pacific Teck), with the depth to open a conversation in your first week. You know which ones actually sell AI infrastructure and which ones talk about it, how a VAR makes money, how their sellers get paid, where services attach sits, and what has to be true for a rep to lead with your product instead of the one they already know. You know the distributors and when to use them.

- 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 VAR 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.

- 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 builder’s instinct: Disciplined qualification (MEDDPICC or equivalent), forecast hygiene, and reporting discipline, paired with comfort in an ambiguous, high-velocity environment with no inherited program and no inherited team. You compress timelines rather than manage them. Running an established channel is a…