Head of Partner Programs, Strategy and Operations

Apollo.io is the leading go-to-market solution for revenue teams, trusted by over 500,000 companies and millions of users globally, from rapidly growing startups to some of the world's largest enterprises. Founded in 2015, the company is one of the fastest growing companies in SaaS, raising approximately $250 million to date and valued at $1.6 billion. Apollo.io provides sales and marketing teams with easy access to verified contact data for over 210 million B2B contacts and 35 million companies worldwide, along with tools to engage and convert these contacts in one unified platform. By helping revenue professionals find the most accurate contact information and automating the outreach process, Apollo.io turns prospects into customers. Apollo raised a series D in 2023 and is backed by top-tier investors, including Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, and more, and counts the former President and COO of Hubspot, JD Sherman, among its board members. As the Head of Partner Operations, you will build and own the operating system that allows Apollo's Partnerships business to scale. Sitting within Revenue Operations, you will be the connective tissue between partner strategy and the company-wide systems, data, processes, and commercial infrastructure that make partner motions work. This is a high-leverage role at the intersection of Partnerships, Revenue Operations, Systems, Data, Finance, Legal. Partner Managers own relationships and execution; you own the operational infrastructure underneath them and you’ll help co-author our partner strategy. You'll establish the metrics and reporting that leadership uses to understand partner performance, architect the processes and systems that support different partner motions, and ensure the commercial mechanics behind those motions work reliably. You'll operate across Apollo's technology, agency, integration, and strategic partner ecosystem. The goal isn't simply to make today's processes run better. It's to build a scalable Partner Operations function that can absorb new partner motions, eliminate operational friction, and give the business a clear understanding of where partnerships are creating revenue and where the model needs to evolve. The Opportunity This is an opportunity to build a function, not inherit a playbook. Partnerships is becoming an increasingly important part of Apollo's revenue ecosystem, but partner motions create a unique operational challenge: the work crosses organizational boundaries, the data often lives across multiple systems, and the right operating model changes as the business learns. The Head of Partner Operations will be responsible for turning that complexity into leverage. You'll help define how Apollo measures partner impact, how partner motions are structured, how systems support them, and how the company can scale partner revenue without scaling operational overhead at the same rate. The strongest person in this role will leave the Partnerships organization with something substantially better than they found it: a clear operating model, trusted data, scalable systems, reliable commercial mechanics, and a set of partner motions that can evolve without rebuilding the infrastructure from scratch. What You'll Do Key Outcomes: Success in this role will be measured by your ability to: Build the operating system for Partnerships. Establish the processes, systems, data model, and governance that allow Partnerships to operate as a measurable, scalable revenue channel. Define clear ownership across Partner Managers, RevOps, Systems, Data, Finance, Legal, and other stakeholders, and create the operating cadence that keeps the machine running. Architect partner motions and commercial models. Partner with the VP of Partnerships and RevOps to design how different partner motions should work end-to-end, from acquisition and qualification through onboarding, activation, revenue generation, expansion, and renewal. Translate strategy into concrete operating models, including workflows, incentives, tiering, deal mechanics, attribution, systems requirements, and measurement. Create a trusted measurement layer for the partner business. Own the reporting infrastructure that gives leadership visibility into partner-driven performance. Establish the operating definitions, instrumentation, dashboards, and recurring reporting for metrics such as the agency funnel, integration adoption, Partner-Involved ARR, sourced/influenced/managed attribution, and partner cohort NRR. Partner with RevOps, Finance and Analytics, while owning the operationalization and ongoing reliability of the resulting metrics. Turn partner data into a decision-making system. Build the mechanisms that allow Partnerships and company leadership to understand which partners, motions, and investments are driving outcomes. Identify gaps in data quality and attribution, establish clear data ownership, and drive remediation upstream. Help drive decisions about where to invest, what to scale, and what to change. Own the partner systems architecture in partnership with Systems. Translate partnership requirements into a coherent systems roadmap spanning Salesforce, PartnerStack, Crossbeam, Apollo, and other connected tooling. Work with Systems and Data Engineering to ensure partner data is captured correctly, flows between systems, and remains usable for reporting and automation. You won't be the administrator for every system; you'll own the requirements, architecture, prioritization, and operating model that make those systems work together. Drive cross-functional initiatives from ambiguity to execution. Partnerships will generate problems that don't fit neatly inside one team's ownership. You'll take ambiguous business needs, turn them into structured requirements, identify the right owners, and drive execution. You are accountable for getting the operating model to a working state even when you don't directly own every component. Continuously improve the economics and efficiency of the partner motion, but not at the expense of growth. Use operational data to identify friction, leakage, and unnecessary manual work across the partner lifecycle. Develop the business case for process changes, automation, or new tooling, and measure whether those investments actually improve partner productivity, revenue contribution, data quality, or operating leverage. What We're Looking For 7+ years of experience in Revenue Operations, Sales Operations, Business Operations, Partner Operations, Strategy & Operations, or a related function, with experience operating in a B2B SaaS environment and working across multiple GTM functions. Must have direct experience in Partnerships within this. Experience building an operating function from the ground up. You've created processes, systems, reporting, and governance where there wasn't previously a mature operating model, and you know how to balance getting today's work done with building what will replace it. Strong understanding of partnerships and partner-led motions. You understand the operational mechanics behind agencies, technology/integration partners, channel programs, strategic partnerships, or similar ecosystems. You understand how partner economics, attribution, incentives, deal registration, and partner lifecycle management work. A systems thinker with a builder's bias. You naturally look for the underlying system behind a recurring problem. Rather than building another workaround, you ask what process, data model, workflow, or automation would prevent the problem from happening again. Strong analytical instincts. You're comfortable working with funnel, pipeline, revenue, cohort, and attribution data and can move between executive-level business questions and the underlying data required to answer them. You know how to distinguish a measurement problem from a business problem. Strong cross-functional leadership without relying on formal authority. You can align multiple XFN Stakeholders around a shared operating model, make tradeoffs explicit, and drive work to completion even when the underlying components are owned by different teams. Strategic and operational range. You can participate in a conversation about the future of Apollo's partner strategy in the morning and then get into the details of an attribution definition, Salesforce workflow, or revenue-share process in the afternoon. Comfortable with ambiguity and evolving requirements. Partner motions are still being built. You should be comfortable creating structure where there isn't much, making decisions with incomplete information, and iterating quickly as the business learns. Strong written and verbal communicator. You can write a crisp operating proposal, explain a complex systems dependency to an executive, turn an ambiguous request into requirements for Engineering, and create documentation that a broader team can actually use. High ownership and strong judgment. You know which problems require a durable solution, which can be handled pragmatically, and when to pull in the right functional owner. You optimize for the health of the overall revenue system rather than protecting functional boundaries. AI Fluency & Tooling Apollo operates at the intersection of AI and go-to-market, and our Revenue Operations organization is expected to lead from the front. This role requires genuine fluency in leveraging AI as part of how you operate and build. That means: Using LLMs as an active operating partner. Whether you're analyzing partner performance, developing SQL, drafting requirements, documenting processes, investigating data quality issues, or preparing an executive recommendation, you should be reaching for AI tools wherever they can materially accelerate your work. Designing partner operations for an AI-native environment. Think beyond dashboards and workflows toward how structured partner data, documentation, and operating context can be made accessible to AI agents and internal tools. You should understand the importance of clean schemas, canonical definitions, semantic documentation, and reliable system interfaces. Using AI to increase operating leverage. The expectation is that a single operator can accomplish substantially more by combining strong judgment with AI-assisted analysis, development, automation, and documentation. Staying ahead of the tooling curve. The AI tooling landscape is moving quickly. We're looking for someone who experiments, learns independently, shares what works, and continuously looks for ways to replace manual operational work with better systems. Knowing where AI should and shouldn't be trusted. AI can accelerate analysis and execution, but it can also introduce hallucinations, incorrect assumptions, and false confidence. You should have strong enough operational and analytical judgment to validate AI-generated outputs and know when first-principles analysis is required. Scope & Ownership Partner Operations sits within Revenue Operations and owns the infrastructure that makes the Partnerships business measurable and scalable. Partner Operations owns: Partner-business reporting, measurement, and recurring instrumentation Partner data quality and attribution Partner systems requirements, architecture, and operating processes Partner lifecycle and funnel instrumentation Deal-registration and commercial operations Partner agreement and amendment administration in partnership with Legal Revenue-share operational tracking and payout process coordination with Finance Partner-related data requests and cross-functional operational workflows Design and documentation of partner operating models and processes Requirements and coordination for systems and data builds Continuous improvement and automation of partner operations Partner Operations partners with, but does not replace: Partner Managers, who own partner relationships, partner strategy, and commercial relationships Systems, who own company-wide systems administration and technical implementation Data Engineering / RevOps Analytics, who own underlying data infrastructure and statistical methodology where applicable Finance, who owns financial controls and payout execution Legal, who owns legal review and contractual risk BizOps, who provides strategic guidance and project support on broader cross-functional initiatives Partner Marketing / Academy, who own co-marketing strategy and certification/badge program design Partnerships technical resources, who may build lightweight agents, automations, or prototypes outside the core company-wide systems infrastructure The listed Pay Range reflects the total cash compensation inclusive of annual base salary and annual bonus as applicable. For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonus target and annual base salary for the role. This salary range may be inclusive of several career levels at Apollo and will be narrowed during the interview process based on a number of factors, including the candidate’s experience, qualifications, and location. Applicants interested in this role who are not located in the US may request the annual salary range for their location during the interview process. Additional benefits for this role may include: equity; company bonus or sales commissions/bonuses; 401(k) plan; at least 10 paid holidays per year, flex PTO, and parental leave; employee assistance program and wellbeing benefits; global travel coverage; life/AD&D/STD/LTD insurance; FSA/HSA and medical, dental, and vision benefits. Tier 1 Pay Range (San Francisco, New York City, Seattle) $184,000 — $270,000 USD Tier 2 Pay Range (All other US Locations) $160,000 — $238,000 USD We are AI Native Apollo.io is an AI-native company built on a culture of continuous improvement. We’re on the front lines of driving productivity for our customers—and we expect the same mindset from our team. If you're energized by finding smarter, faster ways to get things done using AI and automation, you'll thrive here. Why You’ll Love Working at Apollo At Apollo, we’re driven by a shared mission: to help our customers unlock their full revenue potential. That’s why we take extreme ownership of our work, move with focus and urgency , and learn voraciously to stay ahead. We invest deeply in your growth, ensuring you have the resources, support, and autonomy to own your role and make a real impact . Collaboration is at our core—we’re all for one , meaning you’ll have a team across departments ready to help you succeed. We encourage bold ideas and courageous action , giving you the freedom to experiment, take smart risks, and drive big wins. If you’re looking for a place where your work matters, where you can push boundaries, and where your career can thrive—Apollo is the place for you. Learn more here!