Slack is the AI-powered platform for work, bringing every app, agent, and automation into a single interface where teams and digital teammates collaborate. We’re looking for an experienced Senior Business Development Manager to recruit, onboard, and manage strategic partners across Slack’s platform ecosystem. You’ll work at the intersection of product, partnerships, and commercial strategy—helping partners build on Slack while driving adoption against established partnership frameworks.

This is a high-visibility, individual contributor role on a centralized team that develops partnership initiatives aligned to Slack’s top platform and product priorities. The right person has strong commercial instincts, genuine curiosity about how platforms create value, and a bias toward building new things over managing the status quo.

Platform Ecosystem Growth

• Drive adoption of Slack’s platform among companies offering software products and services to businesses, with a focus on the AI agent, MCP, and automation ecosystems.

• Recruit and onboard strategic partners that extend Slack through integrations, connectors, workflows, and data connectivity—managing internal alignment and partner readiness throughout.

• Identify whitespace where platform gaps exist and develop partner-driven solutions to address them, including partnerships that enhance intelligent agent workflows and in-context AI capabilities.

• Develop mutually beneficial, trusting relationships with partners. Make Slack a favored company with which to partner.

AI & Agent Ecosystem Partnerships

• Recruit and manage partners across the AI and data stack—including LLM providers, agent platforms, analytics tools, and infrastructure enablers—into Slack’s ecosystem programs.

• Champion creative business models (capacity-based pricing, embedded experiences, ecosystem monetization) that unlock value for customers while ensuring mutual success for partners.

• Support the development of monetization and distribution models tailored for Slack’s MCP ecosystem, AgentExchange, and “Add to Slack” deployment pathways.

• Work cross-functionally with product, engineering, and legal teams to ensure partner solutions are technically sound, secure, and aligned to strategic priorities.

Partner Execution & Go-to-Market

• Own the partner engagement lifecycle: from opportunity identification and initial outreach through onboarding, activation, and GTM readiness.

• Navigate ambiguity, prioritize thoughtfully, and move quickly to bring new partners onto the platform in a rapidly evolving AI landscape.

• Execute go-to-market plans that demonstrate a compelling value proposition for both Slack and its partners.

• Ensure partner engagements are scalable and built for long-term success—your focus is on recruiting new partners and driving activation, not maintaining legacy relationships.

Cross-Functional Influence

• Partner with stakeholders across Slack product, platform engineering, AI, AppExchange, AgentExchange, and GTM teams to align on roadmap gaps and ecosystem leverage points.

• Understand and communicate market opportunities, trends, partner feedback, and competitive intelligence to cross-functional teams.

• Act as a thought leader on the AI partner landscape and what it means for Slack’s platform strategy.

• Contribute to strategy sessions, internal readouts, and investment cases with insight and clarity.

• 7+ years in business development, strategic partnerships, or platform strategy—ideally in SaaS, AI, developer platforms, or cloud ecosystems.

• Proven experience recruiting partners into platform or ecosystem programs and managing those relationships through activation and scale.

• Strong product sensibility and comfort with the technical feasibility of partner integrations, including APIs, workflows, agents, and automation.

• Familiarity with generative AI, LLMs, MCP (Model Context Protocol), agent frameworks, and the broader AI infrastructure landscape.

• An entrepreneurial spirit with a record of sourcing, developing, and maintaining partner relationships in fast-moving markets.

• Strong commercial instincts combined with the ability to work effectively across technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Exceptional presentation and communication skills, including business case development and partner storytelling.

• Ability to structure and analyze the quantitative impact of partnerships on the business.

• In-depth experience operating within and leading cross-functional teams (product, engineering, customer success, legal, finance, marketing).

• Passion about Slack, our platform, and the role of AI in transforming how teams work.

• Background in product, customer support, or developer tool software partnerships.

• Experience with marketplace or app store business models.

• Prior work at a platform company or in a platform-adjacent BD role.