Partner Manager

The role, in a nutshell:

We’re looking for a highly motivated strategic partner/business development professional (VARs) 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 and deliver partner-sourced and partner-influenced pipeline and revenue outcomes across a portfolio of assigned VARs and Regional System Integrators, with clear accountability for contribution to overall bookings.
• Drive consistent pipeline creation through joint prospecting, partner-led opportunity identification, and co-selling motions with aligned field sales teams.
• Improve partner attach rates by enabling partners to position Chainguard as a core component of their security, cloud-native, and modernization offerings.
• Accelerate deal velocity and win rates by ensuring partners are effectively enabled, engaged early in the sales cycle, and aligned to customer use cases.
• Identify, recruit, and prioritize high-performing partners that demonstrate sustained investment in Chainguard through sales focus, technical enablement, and go-to-market execution.
• Execute joint business planning with partners, including pipeline targets, solution focus areas, enablement milestones, and marketing initiatives, and track progress through quarterly and annual business reviews.
• Drive measurable progress in partner readiness metrics, including certifications, solution validation, demo capability, and delivery confidence.
• Increase partner-driven demand generation impact through joint regional marketing campaigns, events, and field activities, with clear attribution to pipeline creation and opportunity progression.
• Maintain strong forecast accuracy and pipeline hygiene by managing partner opportunities in SFDC and related tools, ensuring visibility into sourced, influenced, and co-sell deals.
• Partner cross-functionally with sales, solution engineering, marketing, and partner operations to remove friction, improve execution efficiency, and scale partner success.

Required Skills / Experience:

• 5+ years of Software Channel Manager experience required.
• Experience working with and through VARs.
• 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.