Key Account Director - OEM

The role

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.

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.

Who we're looking for

• 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.
• 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.

What good looks like

• OEM and strategic partnerships
• You've directly owned named OEM relationships - hardware, cloud, ISV embed deals - and can point to documented joint revenue growth from each.
• Channel and indirect selling
• Your pipeline track record shows partner-sourced and partner-influenced deals (deal registration, PIO) - not just direct quota carrying.
• Infrastructure software background
• You've sold data, cloud, open source, DevOps, or middleware products. You understand technical buyers and how developer-led adoption actually works.
• Quantified revenue impact
• You own your numbers: Growth rate, Customer satisfaction rate, contribution to ARR milestones.
• Cross-functional orchestration
• 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.
• Ecosystem fluency
• You're comfortable across GSIs (Accenture, PwC, EY, Tech Mahindra), RSIs (CDW, Insight, AHEAD, Optiv), ISVs, and the big-3 clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP).

What sets you apart

• Built a channel or partner program from scratch
• Hyperscaler marketplace and co-sell experience: AWS, Azure, or GCP private offers and marketplace transactions
• Been part of a company through an IPO or major funding milestone
• Fluent in open source commercial models: subscription, support, managed-service monetization
• Public sector exposure (FED/SLED) as an additional partner-led motion
• Managed direct or matrixed teams - a plus for this player-coach scope, not a hard requirement