Senior Director, Strategic Partnerships

Senior Director, Strategic Partnerships Location: Austin, TX Department: Strategic Partnerships Reports To: Executive Leadership About inKind inKind is transforming restaurant financing and customer engagement through an innovative fintech platform that provides restaurants with growth capital while helping consumers discover and enjoy dining experiences nationwide. As we continue to scale, we are building strategic partnerships that expand how consumers access inKind, create value for our restaurant partners, strengthen our platform, and unlock meaningful new growth opportunities. Role Summary inKind is seeking a Senior Director, Strategic Partnerships to lead the strategy, orchestration, execution, and overall outcomes of some of the company's most important strategic partnerships. This is a senior leadership role operating at the intersection of business strategy, product, technology, financial services, operations, and go-to-market execution. You will work closely with executive leadership and senior external partners to translate complex partnership opportunities into scalable programs that deliver measurable commercial and customer impact. You will own the partnership operating model from strategic alignment and solution design through implementation, launch, adoption, optimization, and expansion. This includes establishing governance, aligning executive stakeholders, driving cross-functional accountability, identifying risks and opportunities, and ensuring that partnerships deliver against their strategic and financial objectives. This is not a traditional partnership-management or program-management position. The Senior Director will be expected to understand the underlying economics and strategic value of each partnership, influence product and commercial strategy, challenge assumptions, navigate ambiguity, and drive decisions across teams without relying on direct authority. You will bring structure to complexity while maintaining the speed and entrepreneurial mindset required in a rapidly scaling organization. What You’ll Own Strategic Partnership Leadership • Own the strategy, operating model, and overall execution of major strategic partnerships from initial planning through launch, optimization, and expansion. • Translate executive commitments, commercial objectives, and partnership agreements into actionable strategies, roadmaps, workstreams, and measurable outcomes. • Serve as a senior relationship leader for key external partners, building trusted relationships with executives and functional leaders. • Develop a deep understanding of each partner's business model, strategic priorities, customer proposition, organizational structure, and decision-making processes. • Identify opportunities to expand partnerships into new products, customer experiences, channels, markets, or commercial models. • Ensure partnership activity remains aligned with inKind's broader company, product, consumer, restaurant, and growth strategies. Executive & Cross-Functional Leadership • Act as the central strategic connector across Product, Engineering, Data, Marketing, Sales, Partner Success, Operations, Support, Finance, Legal, Risk, Compliance, and Information Security. • Establish clear ownership and accountability across complex initiatives spanning multiple teams and organizations. • Create executive governance structures that enable fast decision-making, transparent escalation, and clear accountability. • Lead executive steering meetings, strategic reviews, partnership planning sessions, and critical decision forums. • Surface competing priorities, organizational constraints, and strategic tradeoffs early and drive stakeholders toward clear decisions. • Influence senior leaders across inKind and partner organizations without requiring direct reporting authority. Partnership Strategy & Commercial Performance • Develop a comprehensive understanding of partnership economics, contractual commitments, strategic value, customer outcomes, and long-term growth potential. • Partner with Finance, Data, Product, Marketing, and commercial leadership to establish clear business cases and success measures. • Define and track KPIs across areas such as customer acquisition, activation, engagement, transaction volume, revenue, restaurant impact, retention, and partnership ROI. • Evaluate performance against business cases and identify opportunities to improve economics, adoption, customer experience, and strategic value. • Identify new opportunities within existing relationships and help develop proposals for partnership expansion. • Provide executive leadership with clear recommendations regarding investment, prioritization, resource allocation, and future partnership opportunities. Product, Technology & Integration Strategy • Partner closely with Product and Engineering leadership to translate partnership objectives into scalable product and technical strategies. • Ensure external commitments are appropriately balanced against product priorities, technical architecture, scalability, and long-term platform strategy. • Provide senior-level coordination across integrations, APIs, data flows, customer experiences, security requirements, testing, and release planning. • Facilitate decisions when commercial objectives, customer requirements, technical constraints, or partner expectations compete. • Ensure privacy, security, regulatory, compliance, and data requirements are incorporated into partnership strategy from the outset. • Help identify opportunities to build reusable capabilities rather than one-off solutions as the strategic-partnership portfolio grows. Go-to-Market, Launch & Organizational Readiness • Oversee integrated go-to-market strategies spanning positioning, customer communications, channels, partner enablement, internal training, launch activities, and ongoing engagement. • Ensure partner and inKind teams are aligned on target audiences, customer journeys, offer mechanics, messaging, launch timing, operational readiness, and measures of success. • Establish clear launch-readiness standards across product, technology, operations, customer support, marketing, legal, compliance, and commercial teams. • Ensure organizational dependencies and readiness risks are identified and addressed before major launches or milestones. • Lead post-launch executive reviews and ensure performance insights translate into prioritized improvements. • Develop repeatable playbooks that improve how inKind launches and scales future strategic partnerships. Governance, Risk & Decision-Making • Establish governance frameworks appropriate for complex, high-value partnerships. • Maintain executive visibility into major risks, dependencies, decisions, commercial implications, and strategic opportunities. • Proactively identify operational, technical, financial, contractual, compliance, regulatory, and reputational risks. • Ensure material issues are escalated early with clear context, options, implications, and recommended paths forward. • Drive disciplined decision-making around changes in scope, investment, timing, requirements, and ownership. • Build relationships that allow difficult conversations and competing priorities to be resolved constructively and quickly. Building the Strategic Partnerships Capability • Help define how inKind evaluates, launches, governs, and scales strategic partnerships as the organization grows. • Build repeatable frameworks, operating models, governance structures, and performance measurement approaches. • Identify opportunities to improve organizational effectiveness across partnership development and execution. • Establish standards for partnership planning, executive reporting, launch readiness, performance reviews, and retrospectives. • Mentor and develop program, partnership, and cross-functional leaders involved in strategic initiatives. • Help determine future organizational and capability needs as the strategic-partnership portfolio expands. Who You Are • Strategic and commercially minded: You understand how partnerships create enterprise value and can connect strategy, economics, customer experience, and execution. • An enterprise-level operator: You can take highly complex initiatives spanning multiple organizations and create clarity, accountability, and momentum. • Executive presence: You are comfortable advising, challenging, and influencing senior executives internally and externally. • Product and technology fluent: You understand how commercial partnerships translate into product experiences, integrations, APIs, data requirements, and technical dependencies. • Outcome oriented: You measure success through business and customer impact rather than simply completing projects. • Comfortable with ambiguity: You can operate effectively when strategy, ownership, requirements, or solutions are still being defined. • Highly accountable: You take ownership of outcomes, identify issues early, and consistently drive initiatives through completion. • A strong communicator: You can simplify complex information into clear decisions, recommendations, and actions. • Relationship driven: You build credibility quickly while remaining willing to challenge partners and internal stakeholders when necessary. • A builder: You are energized by creating scalable systems and capabilities rather than simply operating established processes. Qualifications • 10+ years of experience across strategic partnerships, business development, program leadership, product operations, management consulting, fintech, payments, financial services, or related fields. • 4+ years operating at a senior leadership level with responsibility for complex, cross-functional or enterprise-wide initiatives. • Demonstrated experience leading significant partnerships involving large external organizations and executive stakeholders. • Experience working with banks, card issuers, payment networks, fintech platforms, loyalty programs, marketplaces, or other regulated financial-services organizations strongly preferred. • Proven ability to lead initiatives spanning Product, Engineering, Data, Operations, Finance, Legal, Compliance, Marketing, and commercial teams. • Strong commercial acumen with experience understanding business models, partnership economics, financial implications, and ROI. • Experience establishing governance models and influencing senior stakeholders across organizational boundaries. • Strong understanding of product development, technical integrations, data flows, APIs, launch readiness, and operational dependencies. • Demonstrated ability to translate data and performance metrics into executive-level recommendations and business decisions. • Exceptional written, verbal, negotiation, facilitation, and executive stakeholder-management skills. • Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience; MBA or other relevant advanced degree is a plus but not required. What Success Looks Like Within the first 6–12 months, the Senior Director will have: • Established a trusted executive operating model across inKind's highest-priority strategic partnerships. • Created clear governance, ownership, escalation paths, and decision-making frameworks across major initiatives. • Built integrated strategic roadmaps connecting commercial, product, technical, operational, compliance, and go-to-market priorities. • Improved the speed and quality of cross-company decision-making by surfacing risks, dependencies, and strategic tradeoffs earlier. • Successfully led major partnership launches or milestones against defined customer, commercial, technical, and operational outcomes. • Established executive-level reporting that provides clear visibility into performance, economics, risks, opportunities, and required decisions. • Demonstrated measurable progress against adoption, engagement, revenue, customer, restaurant, and strategic…