Key Account Director - OEM

<p>We're hiring a Key Account Director to own Aiven's largest OEM and strategic technology partnerships across AMER. You'll drive partner-sourced and partner-influenced revenue — building the relationships, programs, and cross-functional alignment that turn partnerships into a measurable, growing share of ARR.</p> <p>This is a role for a builder-operator: someone who has stood up or scaled channel and OEM motions inside infrastructure software companies before, and has the numbers to show for it.</p> <h2><strong>Who we're looking for</strong></h2> <p>You think in partnerships, not transactions. You've spent your career embedded in the channel — recruiting partners, building programs, negotiating OEM and ISV agreements, and pulling together sales, marketing, engineering, and product teams to grow joint business.</p> <p>You're comfortable in a startup with no playbook and in a large enterprise where you have to create new habits between direct sellers and the partner ecosystem. What drives you is taking a partner relationship from a standing start — or a stalled one — and turning it into a self-sustaining revenue engine. You have the YoY growth numbers, partner counts, and ARR contributions to prove it.</p> <h2><strong>What good looks like</strong></h2> <p><strong>OEM and strategic partnerships</strong> You've directly owned named OEM relationships — hardware, cloud, ISV embed deals — and can point to documented joint revenue growth from each.</p> <p><strong>Channel and indirect selling</strong> Your pipeline track record shows partner-sourced and partner-influenced deals (deal registration, PIO) — not just direct quota carrying.</p> <p><strong>Infrastructure software background</strong> You've sold data, cloud, open source, DevOps, or middleware products. You understand technical buyers and how developer-led adoption actually works.</p> <p><strong>Quantified revenue impact</strong> You own your numbers: Growth rate, Customer satisfaction rate, contribution to ARR milestones.</p> <p><strong>Cross-functional orchestration</strong> You've matrix-managed sales, marketing, SAs, engineering, and ops to execute joint go-to-market plans — and you know how to move all of them in the same direction at the same time.</p> <p><strong>Ecosystem fluency</strong> You're comfortable across GSIs (Accenture, PwC, EY, Tech Mahindra), RSIs (CDW, Insight, AHEAD, Optiv), ISVs, and the big-3 clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP).</p> <h2><strong>What sets you apart</strong></h2> <ul> <li>Built a channel or partner program from scratch&nbsp;</li> <li>Hyperscaler marketplace and co-sell experience: AWS, Azure, or GCP private offers and marketplace transactions</li> <li>Been part of a company through an IPO or major funding milestone</li> <li>Fluent in open source commercial models: subscription, support, managed-service monetization</li> <li>Public sector exposure (FED/SLED) as an additional partner-led motion</li> <li>Managed direct or matrixed teams — a plus for this player-coach scope, not a hard requirement</li> </ul>