Strategic Hardware Partnerships
Gimlet Labs is hiring a Strategic Hardware Partnerships lead in San Francisco to own end-to-end relationships with silicon and accelerator vendors — strategy, technical evaluations/POCs, commercial agreements, deployment and scale — for its multi-silicon AI inference cloud. It blends business development with hands-on cross-functional program execution.
- Compensation
- $300K–$350K / yr
- Location
- San Francisco, CA
- Work setup
- Onsite
- Seniority
- Not specified
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- Not specified
- Category
- Hardware
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Track record of owning complex partnerships or programs and delivering results through hands-on execution
- Strong commercial judgment and ability to develop a negotiating position across economics, financing, capacity and risk
- Ability to lead cross-functional teams and influence senior stakeholders without relying on reporting lines
- Technical fluency to work with Engineering on silicon, accelerators, AI workloads and infrastructure tradeoffs
- Ability to move between long-term partner strategy and details of POCs, agreements, supply and deployment
- High agency, practical problem-solving skills and persistent follow-through in a fast-moving environment
- Clear written and verbal communication, including turning complex issues into decisions and commitments
- Sound judgment, strong sense of ownership, trusted relationships and handling sensitive commercial information
Nice to have
- Experience with established silicon providers, emerging accelerator companies, hardware ecosystems or AI infrastructure
- Experience taking a partner program from evaluation or POC into deployment and production scale
- Experience structuring hardware or capacity agreements, financing arrangements or other complex commercial transactions
- Experience connecting hardware partner programs to customer demand, offtake or joint go-to-market activity
- Experience working across hardware supply chains, cloud infrastructure and technical integration in a growing company
Full description
About us
Gimlet is building the first multi-silicon neocloud designed for fast, efficient AI inference.
We combine large-scale compute infrastructure with an execution platform that partitions AI workloads and maps each stage to the hardware best suited to run it.
We work with foundation labs, hyperscalers, and AI-native companies, giving our team access to technical problems spanning frontier models, production infrastructure, and emerging hardware.
About the role
As part of Strategic Hardware Partnerships, you will turn Gimlet Labs’ relationships with established silicon providers and emerging accelerator companies into deployed technical and economic advantage. Gimlet is building a heterogeneous AI cloud designed to run workloads on the hardware best suited to them. You will independently own major partners and programs end to end, from partner strategy and technical evaluation through commercial agreements, POCs, deployment and scale.
This is an operator-first role: you will lead cross-functional teams and drive outcomes, combining strategic judgment with hands-on execution. You will own the partner relationship, partner strategy and commercial position, including financing structures, capacity commitments and roadmap alignment. You will work closely with GTM, Supply Chain, Engineering, Finance, Legal, Infrastructure and PMO; functional teams retain ownership of their domains while you integrate the work and remain accountable for the partner outcome.
We can flex the level and scope of this role for the right person. We care most about your ability to take accountability for complex partnerships, make sound decisions and get important work done.
What success looks like
In the first 12-18 months, you will:
- Build and execute strategies for major and emerging silicon and accelerator partners, grounded in Gimlet’s workload needs, performance, supply, economics and scale
- Establish trusted relationships with partner executives and working teams, securing roadmap access and clear mutual commitments
- Lead cross-functional partner programs with clear owners, decisions and dependencies across Engineering, GTM, Supply Chain, Finance, Legal, Infrastructure and PMO
- Drive technical evaluations and POCs with Engineering, defining success criteria and translating results into partner and deployment decisions
- Develop and negotiate partner-side commercial positions, including pricing, financing structures, capacity commitments and agreements, with Finance and Legal
- Work with GTM to connect partner capabilities to customer demand, offtake and joint go-to-market opportunities, including three-party programs