Director, Strategic Partnerships & Sales

Role Overview

Director, Strategic Partnerships & Sales at MinIO, based in Riyadh. This is a senior partnership and business development role owning a flagship strategic partnership end-to-end—commercially, operationally, and strategically—as it scales from initial agreement into a multi-year, multi-workstream engagement across the region's sovereign AI infrastructure landscape.

Company Overview

MinIO is the data and memory foundation for enterprise AI. Built for the speed, scale, and economics that AI and analytics demand, AIStor and MemKV unify every layer of the data stack, from agentic and inference context memory to tables and objects across core, edge, and cloud. Trusted by 77% of the Fortune 100, MinIO is redefining how AI factories, intelligent applications, and autonomous agents secure, persist, and unlock the full value of their data.

Role Purpose

You will sit at the intersection of enterprise sales, channel/reseller strategy, and executive relationship management, acting as the primary point of contact between MinIO and the partner's business and technical teams. You will operate with credibility at C-level on both sides, owning the partnership relationship across all dimensions while driving pipeline, revenue, and operational excellence.

Key Responsibilities

Partnership Management & Operations

• Own the day-to-day partnership relationship and act as the primary point of contact between MinIO and the partner's business and technical teams, keeping both sides aligned on commitments, priorities, and delivery milestones across the joint platform engagement.
• Build and maintain executive relationships, serving as the primary business point of contact for partner executives and keeping leadership on both sides engaged and aligned on the health and direction of the partnership.
• Manage ongoing partner operations by running recurring cadences with the partner—QBRs, roadmap syncs, escalation handling—and keeping internal stakeholders informed of partnership status, risks, and commercial health.

Commercial Growth & Negotiations

• Expand the commercial scope of the partnership by identifying and negotiating opportunities to grow the relationship—new use cases, new regions, upsells, renewals, and expanded terms—building on the existing agreement.
• Manage contract renewals and amendments by owning the negotiation of renewals, amendments, and expanded commercial terms as the partnership evolves.
• Own quota or targets tied to pipeline and revenue generated through the partnership and work with sales to convert the relationship into closed business.

Go-to-Market & Channel Execution

• Run joint go-to-market execution by partnering with marketing and sales to execute co-selling motions, joint offers, and campaigns—including reseller/channel activation—that activate the partnership commercially.
• Navigate reseller and channel dynamics to manage complexity across the partner ecosystem, ensuring commercial terms remain consistent with MinIO's broader channel strategy.

Strategic Translation & Advocacy

• Translate partner needs into internal priorities by bringing partner feedback and requirements back to product and engineering, and advocate for the resourcing needed to keep commitments on track—without owning the product roadmap yourself.

Reporting & External Representation

• Track and report on partnership performance by defining and reporting on KPIs for the partnership—pipeline generated, revenue closed, deployment milestones hit, and overall partnership health—to regional and global leadership.
• Represent MinIO externally alongside the partner at industry events (including flagship regional events such as LEAP), conferences, and executive briefings to strengthen the partnership's visibility in the market.

Qualifications & Experience

• 15–20 years of collective experience across sales, presales, channel/alliances, and business development, ideally within infrastructure, data, or AI/ML companies, with a meaningful portion in a strategic partnership or key-account ownership capacity.
• Deep, demonstrated familiarity with the Saudi Arabia enterprise technology and sovereign-AI/government-adjacent ecosystem, including national AI infrastructure initiatives and the broader Vision 2030 digital infrastructure landscape.
• Track record of managing and growing an existing strategic partnership at scale—expanding scope, renewing and amending contracts, and increasing revenue over multi-year horizons.
• Demonstrated success managing a partner relationship that drove measurable pipeline or revenue growth over time.
• Comfort owning commercial terms and contract negotiations directly (MSAs, NFRs, exclusivity, revenue share, reseller structures), with support from legal as needed.

Skills & Competencies

• Strong working knowledge of object storage, data infrastructure, or AI/ML ecosystems—enough to speak credibly with technical stakeholders on topics like sovereign AI infrastructure, inference/training data pipelines, and platform architecture, though this is not a hands-on technical role.
• Excellent relationship-building and executive communication skills, fully comfortable in the room with C-level partners and government-adjacent stakeholders.
• Experience with co-selling motions, joint go-to-market execution, channel/reseller management, and partner enablement.
• Bilingual fluency in Arabic and English, with a professional communication style suited to the Gulf enterprise and government context.

Additional Information

• Based in Riyadh; willing to travel regionally to partner sites, conferences, and industry events as needed.
• MinIO is an equal opportunity workplace and affirmative action employer committed to reviewing applications without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, veteran status, genetic information, physical or mental disability, medical condition, marital status, or any other basis prohibited by law.