Partnerships Associate - Founder's Office

Partnerships Associate — Founder's Office

Location: Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India; relocation to Dubai/Abu Dhabi possible if the pipeline earns it

Experience: Minimum 2 years (real partnership or enterprise BD ownership — deals with your name on them)

Compensation: INR 50,000 – 75,000 / month + Incentives (uncapped, deal-linked)

Start: Immediate

We're not hiring a relationship manager who forwards a brochure into a WhatsApp group and calls it partnerships.

We're an AI-native company taking our existing Middle East relationships from a foothold to a real regional book, while building out our core business with Middle East banks and FCs — and the DSA (Direct Selling Agent) networks that feed them. Partnerships here means knowing that a bank's Chief Digital Officer doesn't want a digital transformation deck — they want to know what an AI underwriting layer does to their NPA ratio, and whether it survives scrutiny under RBI's new FREE-AI framework. It means knowing that a co-lending FC's Head of Retail Lending will forward your one-pager to three people before lunch if the ROI math is airtight, and delete it if it isn't. And it means knowing that partnerships in 2026 is a commercial discipline, not a coffee-meeting habit.

You'll work directly inside the Founder's Office on partnerships — banks and FCs first, DSA networks close behind, UAE/GCC expansion as a live, funded mandate, not a someday-slide. You'll own real relationships, real numbers, and real travel. And you'll use AI as infrastructure for research and prep, not as a novelty you mention in the interview.

What You'll Actually DoBank & NBFC Partnerships — Own the Core Relationship

This is the core of the role. Roughly 55–60% of your week lives here.

• Own end-to-end partnership development with banks and FCs: map the org (CDO/CTDO, CRO, Head of Retail Lending/Assets, Chief Innovation Officer), get past the gatekeepers, and run the empanelment process yourself — vendor onboarding criteria, RFE submissions, the periodic reviews that keep you on the approved list
• Sell AI/tech transformation that maps to real BFSI pain: AI-driven underwriting and credit scoring, fraud detection, GenAI copilots for RMs and collections teams, LOS/LMS modernization, Account Aggregator-based underwriting workflows — not a generic AI transformation pitch
• Activate and manage DSA network partnerships downstream of the core institutional relationship. Know when you're selling to the bank or NBFC itself versus enabling their DSA channel, and structure commercials — co-lending logic, LSP-compliant agreements — accordingly
• Own the full deal cycle yourself: first outreach, stakeholder mapping, pitch, technical and commercial negotiation, contracting (MSA/SOW/NDA), and a clean handoff to delivery
• Know the regulatory scaffolding well enough to not waste a CDO's time in the first meeting: RBI's Digital Lending Directions, the LSP (Lending Service Provider) classification, co-lending norms, and what the RBI's FREE-AI Committee report actually recommends
• Own your pipeline numbers honestly — deal value, win rate, cycle time — and know which conversations are real pipeline versus a CXO being polite

Middle East / GCC — Expand What's Already Working

Roughly 25–30% of your week.

• Take our existing Middle East relationships and build a real expansion plan against them — not a cold-InMail list
• Get fluent fast in the difference between DIFC (the region's established banking hub) and ADGM (fintech- and sandbox-focused) — know which zone your prospect sits in and why it changes your pitch
• Travel to the UAE for meetings that need a room, not a Zoom link — and be willing to be based there if the pipeline earns it
• Plan around the region's actual working calendar — the Sunday–Thursday week, Ramadan's shortened hours, Eid blackout periods — instead of assuming the GCC runs on India's clock
• Speak credibly to the UAE Central Bank's Open Finance mandate and Saudi's Open Banking framework — enough to sound like you've done this before, not like you Googled it that morning

Deal Commercials & Structuring

Roughly 10–15% of your week.

• Structure pricing and incentive-linked commercials for enterprise BFSI deals — know the difference between a services SOW and a platform license, and when a deal should be commission-linked versus flat fee
• Build your own pitch materials. You don't need a design team on standby — you brief a one-pager or deck sharp enough that a designer or an AI tool can turn it around same-day

Other Motions — Round Out the Book

• Arm marketing with real BFSI case studies and win stories — content that gets cited when a bank's procurement team googles AI transformation vendor for NBFCs
• Show up at BFSI industry events (FIBAC, Global Fintech Fest, and similar) and work the room, not the booth
• Feed win/loss patterns and real objections back to product and marketing — you're the most honest source in the building for why deals actually die

Growth Experimentation — Find the Deals Nobody's Chasing Yet

• Identify undersaturated segments before anyone else does — MSME lenders, co-lending-only FCs, insurance-adjacent lenders — and build the case to go after them
• Run the AI-native BD stack fluently: CRM, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Perplexity/ChatGPT/Claude for account research and competitive intel, so your prep time drops and your hit rate doesn't
• Document every deal — what you ran, who said no and why, what you'd do differently — so the team can read it without you in the room

The Stack You'll Work In

You should already be comfortable with most of this. If you're learning it from scratch, this isn't the right role yet.

Partnerships & Sales: CRM (HubSpot / Zoho / Salesforce / LeadSquared), LinkedIn Sales Navigator, DocuSign or equivalent for contracting BFSI Domain: RBI Digital Lending Directions, co-lending and LSP frameworks, the Account Aggregator ecosystem, bank/NBFC empanelment and RFE processes Middle East: DIFC vs. ADGM basics, UAE Open Finance regulations, Saudi's Open Banking framework Decks & Comms: PowerPoint / Canva / Google Slides for fast iteration AI Research & Prep: Perplexity Pro, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini Automation & Docs: Notion AI, Loom, Zapier / n8n for the boring glue Analytics: Excel / Looker Studio for pipeline, CAC, and deal-tracking

Who You Are

You've owned real partnership or BD relationships for at least 2 years — BFSI, fintech, or enterprise B2B SaaS — and you can talk about them by number: deal value closed, partnerships signed, pipeline generated. Not supported the BD team.

Specifically:

• Excellent verbal communication — you can hold a room with a CRO or a Head of Retail Lending, take a hard question on pricing or compliance, and not blink
• You've sold or presented to CXOs and Heads of Department before, and you know the difference between a decision-maker and someone who just schedules the meeting
• You're conversant in the bank/NBFC/DSA ecosystem already, or you can get genuinely fluent in a couple of weeks, not a couple of quarters
• You're willing to travel to the UAE regularly, and open to being based there if the role calls for it
• You use AI tools daily for research, prep, and iteration — not as a novelty you mention once
• You ask uncomfortable questions: Is this actually a decision-maker Why are we still chasing this account What's our real cost to close here
• You're an all-rounder by instinct — equally fine writing a one-pager, building a stakeholder map, negotiating a commercial term, or getting on a flight with two days notice

This Role Is NOT for You If

• You think partnerships means forwarding a brochure and waiting for a reply
• You've never sat across from someone who could actually say yes or no to a six- or seven-figure deal
• You need a defined territory, a script, and weekly hand-holding
• The Middle East is a slide in someone else's deck to you, not a market you'd get on a plane for
• You're not already using AI tools daily in your actual work
• You're allergic to travel, ambiguity, or being told figure it out by a founder

What You'll Get

• Direct access to founders — your deals get discussed, unblocked, and re-strategized in the same week
• Full relationship ownership, not execution of someone else's account plan
• A live, funded mandate to build out a new region, not maintain an existing one
• Uncapped, deal-linked incentives on top of fixed pay
• A ground-floor seat in an AI-native company's BFSI and GCC expansion — the playbook is being written as you go