Global Head of Partnerships

Thought Machine's mission is bold – to properly and permanently rid the world's banks of legacy technology. To achieve this, we have developed the foundations of modern banking through core and payments technology which run natively in the cloud. What we are attempting is hard and means we need great people working together to build great technology. We have grown rapidly in the past few years – growing our team to more than 550 individuals across offices in London, New York, Singapore, Sydney and our newly established Engineering Hub in Lisbon. We have raised more than £500m in funding and our investors include Molten Ventures, Eurazeo, Intesa Sanpaolo, Temasek, Nyca Partners, JPMorgan Chase Strategic Investments, Standard Chartered Ventures, and more. We have created a culture that enables our team to produce the best work in the industry while ensuring we have fun along the way. We're regularly cited as having a fantastic workplace culture and have been recognised by Sifted magazine as having one of the highest Glassdoor ratings for a UK fintech company and the industry's most generous employee share package. Named one of the world's most innovative fintechs by Global Finance Magazine, we were also recognised by the Financial Times as one of Europe's fastest-growing companies for two consecutive years—and a UK Best Employer for 2026. A key element of that is a strong partnerships ecosystem that delivers commercial value, enhances our proposition, and accelerates the value our clients see on the ground. Therefore, we are now looking for a Head of Global Partnerships to architect, enable, lead that ecosystem, bringing Vault Core and Vault Payments to every bank and fintech on the planet. As Global Head of Partnerships, you’ll lead a global team to enhance our partner ecosystem, creating a market-leading engine which gets our products live with our clients more efficiently, enhances the value our products have for our clients, and accelerates our overall growth in existing and new markets. A successful leader will possess strong commercial acumen and a hunger to deliver outstanding partner and client outcomes, but also a keen interest in the engineering behind our products in order to identify the best opportunities. As a manager of managers, we also look for people who have a passion for developing others. Key duties: - Ecosystem Strategy & Architecture: Identify and prioritise partnership categories, from global payment networks to AI-driven specialists, that enhance our competitive position and solve critical client needs. - Commercial Deal Architecture: Design and negotiate high-stakes commercial agreements, including joint go-to-market (GTM) strategies and related revenue sharing and incentives that drive profitable ARR growth for Thought Machine and our partners. - Commercial Enablement & GTM: Develop the playbooks and sales enablement tools required to turn joint-solutions into sellable product sets that accelerate sales cycles and open new territories. - Team Leadership & Scaling: Manage and scale a high-performing team of five Partnership Managers, shifting the focus from "introductions" to "executed commercial outcomes" while building repeatable global processes. - Market-Product Alignment: Collaborate with Product Leads to ensure that product partnerships and related third-party integrations are high-quality, reliable, and add immediate value to our core banking and payments products. - Strategic Intelligence: Act as a primary feedback loop for the CPO, providing data-backed insights on market trends and competitor moves to inform "build-vs-buy-vs-partner" decisions. - Partner Enablement & Quality Control: Establish and enforce "Vault-Certified" standards, defining the technical and operational benchmarks partners must meet to ensure confident and efficient deliveries, and working alongside others to structure and deliver programmes which help partners to be confident in selling or delivering our solutions. - Regio…