Introduction

Joining the IBM Technology Expert Labs team means becoming part of a global organization focused on delivering world-class outcomes for clients, partners, and IBM. Expert Labs combines deep technical expertise, operational excellence, and ecosystem collaboration to accelerate business value and drive growth across IBM's software portfolio.

Our culture is collaborative, innovative, and outcome-oriented. We empower our teams to solve complex business challenges, influence strategic decisions, and deliver measurable impact across the organization while continuously developing their professional and leadership capabilities.

Your role and responsibilities

Strategic partnerships are a critical growth engine for Expert Labs. Building and enabling a high-performing ecosystem requires effective recruitment, onboarding, and partner integration capabilities that accelerate value creation and market expansion.

As a Partner Acquisition & Onboarding Lead, you will be responsible for identifying, recruiting, onboarding, and enabling sales partners globally. You will help expand the Expert Labs ecosystem mission while ensuring partners are successfully integrated into operational, commercial, and sales & delivery models including hyperscale marketplaces (i.e. Microsoft, AWS, etc).

You will collaborate with Legal, Procurement, Ecosystem, Select Sales, Delivery, Finance, Operations, and other cross-functional teams to accelerate partner activation and improve onboarding effectiveness.

Your primary responsibilities will include:

• Manage end-to-end process and onboarding of business partners / suppliers globally.

• Recruit new partners to resell Expert Labs Service Offerings or scale IBM technology skills gaps.

• Lead, enable, and manage onboarding of delivery partners from acquisitions (i.e. Hashicorp, Confluent, etc) to ensure readiness.

• Support contract negotiations and escalations to BU leaders, if appropriate.

Build trusted partnerships with local Procurement teams.

• Develop onboarding frameworks and playbooks.

• Measure & improve onboarding cycle times.

• Key focal of Integrators relationship (e.g. ICS).

• Collaborate across business functions to enable partner success.

• Scale hyperscaler marketplaces (i.e. Microsoft, AWS) & optimize funding programs as a new route optimizing direct capture of committed spend.

• Special projects as assigned.

Required education

Bachelor's Degree

Preferred education

Master's Degree

Required technical and professional expertise

• Experience in partner management, alliances, or business development.
• Experience leading onboarding or enablement programs.
• Contract negotiation and stakeholder management skills.
• Strong project management capabilities.
• Advanced English proficiency.

Preferred technical and professional experience

• SaaS ecosystem experience.
• Channel sales knowledge.
• Alliance management experience.
• CRM and Partner Management platforms.