Partner Manager, AI Native Ecosystems - Customer.io

About Customer.io

Over 9,000 companies — from scrappy startups to global brands — use our platform to send billions of emails, push notifications, in-app messages, and SMS every day. Customer.io powers automated communication that people actually want to receive. We help teams send smarter, more relevant messages using real-time behavioral data.

About the Role

A new wave of AI SaaS builders - Lovable, Vercel, Cursor, Bolt, and others - is becoming the default starting point for how software gets built, and each one is standing up its own marketplace or integration directory to connect what people build inside them to real backend services.

We are hiring a Partner Manager, AI Native Ecosystems to make Customer.io the obvious, pre-integrated messaging and engagement layer for everything built on these platforms. This role sits at the intersection of business development and technical integration work: part of the job is identifying and recruiting the right platforms and negotiating partnership terms; the other part is working hands-on with our Product team to scope and ship the actual integration required to get listed and featured.

What You’ll Do

• Immediate priority: Optimize our existing Claude and ChatGPT integrations, including MCP discoverability and GEO (making sure Customer.io shows up when AI tools recommend a messaging/engagement platform).
• Identify and prioritize which AI builder platforms (Vercel, Cursor, Lovable, Bolt, Google, AWS, and others) are worth partnering with, working with Engineering, Design, and Product to assess technical feasibility and distribution potential, including CLI and MCP connector priorities.
• Own the full partner relationship lifecycle - outbound, negotiation, and ongoing management - from first contact through signed agreement through shipped integration.
• Negotiate commercial terms (revenue share, co-marketing, marketplace listing requirements) directly with partner and BD counterparts.
• Translate each marketplace's technical requirements into a spec and work hands-on with our engineering team to scope and ship the integration - you don't need to write the integration yourself, but you need to be fluent enough to unblock it.
• Get Customer.io listed, verified, and ideally featured in each platform's marketplace or directory, and manage the relationship as review guidelines and requirements evolve.
• Track installs, activations, and pipeline sourced from each marketplace; report on which partnerships are driving real usage versus which need renegotiation or deprioritization.
• Build the playbook as you go, creating repeatable criteria (target criteria, technical requirements checklist, deal template) so new platforms can be evaluated and onboarded quickly.

What We're Looking For

• 5–7 years in business development, partnerships, or platform/ecosystem roles, ideally with a developer tools, API-first, or marketplace-driven product.
• A track record of getting a product listed and adopted inside another platform's ecosystem (e.g., Shopify App Store, Salesforce AppExchange, Zapier, Segment Connections, or comparable).
• Real technical fluency: you can read API and webhook documentation, understand OAuth and auth scopes, are comfortable discussing CLI tooling, and hold your own in a scoping conversation with engineers.
• Strong deal-making instincts - comfortable structuring revenue share, co-marketing, and referral agreements, and negotiating directly with partner and BD counterparts.
• Bias to action in an undefined category as these marketplaces and their rules are new and changing monthly.
• An understanding of self-serve, product-led growth motions catering primarily to small business end-customers.
• Based in North America.
• Excellent cross-functional operator working closely with product, engineering, marketing, and legal.

What We Value

• Bias to Action: Comfortable building the process, not just executing an existing one.
• Cross-Functional Fluency: Equally credible in a deal negotiation and a technical scoping conversation with engineers.
• Ownership: Drives a relationship from first contact through signed agreement through shipped integration.
• Resourcefulness: Comfortable operating without a dominant brand — you're earning the meeting, not getting it by default.