Head of Product Partnerships at Thought Machine

Thought Machine's mission is bold – to properly and permanently rid the world's banks of legacy technology. To achieve this, we have developed the foundations of modern banking through core and payments technology which run natively in the cloud. What we are attempting is hard and means we need great people working together to build great technology. We have grown rapidly in the past few years – growing our team to more than 550 individuals across offices in London, New York, Singapore, Sydney and our newly established Engineering Hub in Lisbon. We have raised more than £500m in funding and our investors include Molten Ventures, Eurazeo, Intesa Sanpaolo, Temasek, Nyca Partners, JPMorgan Chase Strategic Investments, Standard Chartered Ventures, and more. We have created a culture that enables our team to produce the best work in the industry while ensuring we have fun along the way. We're regularly cited as having a fantastic workplace culture and have been recognised by Sifted magazine as having one of the highest Glassdoor ratings for a UK fintech company and the industry's most generous employee share package. Named one of the world's most innovative fintechs by Global Finance Magazine, we were also recognised by the Financial Times as one of Europe's fastest-growing companies for two consecutive years—and a UK Best Employer for 2026. At Thought Machine, we believe the next era of finance is predictive, personal, and powered by AI. Over the last decade, we engineered the cloud-native foundation making that vision a reality — bridging sophisticated architectural logic with the real-time data required for world-class customer experiences. Our platform is globally recognised for its radical flexibility and resiliency, empowering the world’s most ambitious banks and fintechs to build, launch, and scale the products and experiences of tomorrow, faster than ever before. After a record year of growth and recently finalising our next fundraising round, we are entering our most ambitious stage of growth yet. We are now looking for a Head of Partnerships to architect and lead the ecosystem that will bring Vault Core and Vault Payments to every bank and fintech on the planet. As Head of Partnerships, you will own the strategic direction and commercial performance of the Thought Machine partner ecosystem. Sitting at the intersection of product strategy and market expansion, you are responsible for ensuring our platform remains the central gravity for the modern financial stack. Starting with a team of five, you will work to ensure we identify and engage the right partners to become a seamless part of our customer offering. You will be the bridge between our internal product roadmap and the external commercial market, ensuring that our ecosystem accelerates sales cycles, opens new territories, and provides a complete, end-to-end solution for our clients big and small. Key duties: - Ecosystem Strategy & Architecture: Identify and prioritise partnership categories—from global payment networks to AI-driven specialists—that enhance our competitive position and solve critical customer needs. - Commercial Deal Architecture: Design and negotiate high-stakes commercial frameworks, including revenue-sharing and joint go-to-market (GTM) strategies that drive measurable ARR growth for Thought Machine and our partners. - Team Leadership & Scaling: Manage and scale a high-performing team of five Partnership Managers, shifting the focus from "introductions" to "executed commercial outcomes" while building repeatable global processes. - Market-Product Alignment: Collaborate with Product Leads to ensure that third-party integrations are high-quality, reliable, and add immediate value to our core banking and payments products. - AI Opportunity & Productisation: Lead the strategy for integrating AI-first partners, ensuring their capabilities are leveraged to deliver the "predictive and personal" banking experiences our clients demand. - Partner Governance & Quality Control: Establish and enforce "Vault-Certified" standards, defining the technical and operational benchmarks partners must meet to ensure zero compromise on system resiliency and regulatory compliance (e.g., DORA, SOC2). - Commercial Enablement & GTM: Develop the playbooks and sales enablement tools required to turn technical solutions and integrations into sellable product sets that accelerate sales cycles and open new territories. - Strategic Intelligence: Act as a primary feedback loop for the CPO, providing data-backed insights on market trends and competitor moves to inform "build-vs-buy-vs-partner" decisions. - Regional Expansion: Develop and execute partnership plans that support our growth in North America, EMEA, and APAC, ensuring our ecosystem is localised and compliant. - Performance & ROI Optimisation: Implement a rigorous framework for tracking ecosystem health, focusing on metrics such as partner-influenced pipeline, integration adoption, and impact on customer time-to-value. Who you are: - Strategic Growth Leader: Extensive experience in Partnerships, Business Development, or Product Strategy within Fintech or Enterprise SaaS. You have a proven ability to use CRM data and market trends to quantify the impact of an ecosystem on sales velocity and LTV. - Commercially Driven: You have a track record of closing complex, multi-million pound deals and understand how to align technical product roadmaps with aggressive revenue targets. - Complex Stakeholder Navigator: You can effectively influence internal Engineering teams while simultaneously navigating the procurement, legal, and risk hurdles of Tier 1 global financial institutions. - Solution-Minded: You understand the modern financial technology landscape and can identify which combination of Thought Machine and partner tech solves a client’s problem most efficiently. - Effective Leader: You have experience managing and developing teams through rapid scale, focusing on clear accountability and the transition from a "deal-support" to a "market-making" model. - A Master Communicator: You navigate high-level negotiations with global incumbents and agile startups alike, building trust through clarity and commercial logic. Traits we value: - Commercial Rigour: You prioritise opportunities based on ROI, market demand, and strategic impact. - Ambitious Outlook: You are motivated by the challenge of replacing legacy banking tech and believe in the AI-powered future of finance. - Metrics Driven: You are able to set and enforce leading, present, and lagging metrics on performance, both for our partners and our team - Decisiveness: You are comfortable making high-stakes calls and moving at the pace of a Series E scale-up. - Directness: You value transparency and provide clear, actionable insights to your team and your peers. Benefits: - Highly competitive salary - Pension plan (match up to 5%) - Life insurance - three times annual salary - Competitive maternity (six months fully paid) and paternity leave (four weeks fully paid) - Shared parental leave (matched to our maternity leave for the same point in time) - 25 days holiday and bank holidays - Flexible working hours - Cycle-to-work scheme - Electric car scheme - Season ticket loan - Access to outstanding learning materials and courses - Sports and hobby clubs, subsidised by Thought Machine - All the latest tech you need - Start the day properly with fresh fruit and cereals - Huge range of healthy (and not-so-healthy) snacks, smoothies and drinks - A talented and experienced team as your colleagues - An environment where we encourage learning and progress - Two charity days a year - Weekly food pop-up We actively hire candidates who demonstrate technical excellence in their field and welcome people of all ages and backgrounds, providing everyone with equal access to professional development. You are encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn't accurately match the job description. We also encourage applications from those with different abilities, including candidates with ADHD, autism, dyslexia or dyspraxia.