Director, Business Operations (New Partnerships)

About the role

The Business Development / Partnerships Lead will own the end-to-end partnerships motion for Jerry's new product lines, including building the pipeline, structuring deals, and ensuring successful onboarding. This role will contribute to vertical strategy by providing a ground-level view of what partners will and won't accept.

Responsibilities

• Build and run the partnerships pipeline for Jerry's new product lines, from initial outreach through signed agreement and successful onboarding.
• Lead insurance carrier and partner conversations independently - qualifying partner fit, understanding what each partner needs, structuring the right value proposition for each, and running the process to close.
• Design creative deal structures for partners who won't fit a standard path. If the obvious approach gets a no, you figure out what alternative arrangement unlocks the relationship.
• Own partner success post-close — work with internal teams to make sure new partners ramp, stay engaged, and become long-term relationships rather than one-time transactions.
• Contribute to vertical strategy — your ground-level view of what partners will and won't accept feeds directly into how we sequence and structure new product bets.

Requirements

Truth-Seeking: You verify before you conclude. You ask the question that surfaces what a partner actually cares about - including the thing they didn't say directly. You use what you learn to guide the team, not just yourself.

Creative: When the standard path is blocked, you find the non-obvious route. You generate new deal structures, partnership models, and go-to-market approaches that hadn’t been done before you arrived.

Meticulous: You notice the data point a partner drops in passing. You catch the inconsistency in a term sheet before it becomes a problem. How you represent Jerry to an external partner reflects your judgment, and you take that seriously.

Builder: You break ambiguous problems into clear steps and personally drive them across the finish line. You easily flex between strategic and hands-on.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in business development, partnerships, or strategy consulting with a track record of closing complex, multi-stakeholder deals.
• Experience building 0-to-1: you've launched a new partnership category, entered a new market, or built a BD function without inheriting a working model.
• Background that combines at least two of: consulting or structured problem-solving, BD or sales execution, early-stage startup operating experience.
• Demonstrated ability to engage senior external stakeholders and navigate large partner organizations independently.
• Strong written and verbal communication: you can present a complex deal structure simply and credibly to an executive audience.