Partnerships manager (tech/product)

About Kombo

Why are customers like Spendesk, Factorial, and Heyjobs excited about Kombo?

Kombo is changing how B2B SaaS companies provide HR integrations to their customers. Instead of having to build and maintain many APIs themselves, Kombo's customers can integrate with Kombo's API once and offer dozens of APIs to their customers instantly. Kombo is solving the pain of implementing all those integrations one by one.

We are have raised over $4M of funding from the world’s best investors (Y Combinator, 468 Capital, Acadian Ventures) and grew from 0 to 1M ARR in our first year. To keep growing at this pace, we need to extend our standing in the ecosystem through close partnerships to the tools we’re integrating.

About the team

The Kombo is a small team of excellent and hard-working individuals with a strong technical bias. The founding team met at University before dropping out and going through Y-Combinator. It's their second venture in the API space.

Our team has grown rapidly since then and includes everything from self-taught coding enthusiasts with decades of expertise to graduates from institutions like CODE, Harvard, Oxford, TU Munich, and HEC Paris. We have accumulated extensive work experience at leading startups and in building scalable software solutions. Our backers include Y Combinator, Acadian Ventures, 468 Capital, and stellar Angels such as Paul Forster (Indeed), Sultan Saidov (Beamery), Jean Deniz Greze (Plaid), Carsten Thoma (Celonis)

Everyone at Kombo lives up to our commonly defined values (which you will learn more about in the “culture fit” section.

Why we need you

Integrating the most relevant tools is the core value-driver of Kombo. That’s why this has been a major focus point for the whole company (esp. our CEO and CPO) for a long time. Now we’re reaching a point where we have so many customers and (potential) partners, that we need help of someone driving this area full-time.

Developing this area forward is one of the core pillars for our growth throughout the next couple of years, so finding someone excellent for this is crucial to our success

Role

What you will get

• Sole responsibility for one of the most important topics at Kombo

• Freedom to shape this area completely by yourself and learn everything there is to learn

• Direct work with CPO and CEO to leverage the existing network and partnerships

• You get the chance to build a top-notch network that will always be an asset to your career

• Compensation

  • Total comp: 55-75k (equity & base salary combined)

What you will work on

• Your primary metric will be hunting logos of big (enterprise) tools Kombo needs to integrate.

  This will mean finding and reaching out to the right contacts at these companies, pitching to them in a call, building a relationship over time. If we don’t have an integration with them yet, you will work on obtaining a testing environment that we can use to build the integration connector.

• In addition, you will work on building relationships with existing and new partners.

  Getting in close touch with the right contact at each partner so that we can reach out about questions and problems with the integration. Getting us listed as an integration partner on their marketplace. Working with them on a fast-track program that helps our customers get listed on their marketplace.

• Helping our customers get in touch with our partners, in case they want to collaborate closely

• Setting up all systems and documentation around integrations/partners so that all of our teams (Engineering, Customer Success, Sales) can work as effectively as possible

• Collaborating with engineering if we are blocked on something that can only be fixed by our partners (missing functionality on their API, bugs, etc.)

What you should bring

Culture

• Radically candid: We are together in this as a team and care deeply about each other. Because of that we share feedback on things that are going well and things that we need to improve. Feedback is a gift is very important to us, so you should expect to give and receive lots of it to make you as good as you can be.
• Stay curious, stay humble: We value curiosity and humility. We encourage everyone to ask questions and keep learning, putting aside their egos so that we can grow and improve together.
• Bias towards action: We're always ready to question priorities and find the fastest way to take action, focusing on practical solutions that move us forward.
• Passionate excellence: We're passionate about what we do, and this passion fuels our pursuit of excellence. We constantly challenge ourselves to achieve the highest standards and deliver outstanding results.
• Customer obesssion: We are deeply embedded in our customers' products, making their success our top priority. We consistently champion our customers' perspectives, ensuring their voices play a crucial role in our decision-making.

Skills

• Excellent communication & negotiation skills

  You have to establish a new product/partnership motion for our partners, understand their incentives in detail, and prepare a compelling pitch. Often times, we have to negotiate with potential partners why this makes sense for them.

  You should be comfortable doing this in English (advantage if you’re fluent in any of German, French or Spanish as well).

• 2-3+ years of experience in tech/product partnerships

  Because you’ll need to understand what drives value for our partners and their customers, clearly sell how we can help them drive that value and build a network in the HR-tech domain.

• Solid technical understanding

  It’s a great advantage if you’re comfortable reading API docs, working with Postman to play around with HTTP requests and have a basic understanding of how APIs work. If you don’t have this already, you should have a strong willingness to learn and to collaborate with the engineering team on solving those challenges.

• Excellent self-organization

  You will be juggling a lot of balls at the same time and will be shape the whole partnerships process on your own. Therefore you need to have experience in organising yourself and keeping threads open with a lot of different stakeholders.

• On-site culture in Berlin

  We are currently completely on-site as we found this helps us shape the culture we want and simplify communication at our current stage. Everyone comes to the office but ofc you can work remotely from time to time. We are happy to help you relocate, if necessary.

• High commitment

  You will be part of a small team of excellent and dedicated individuals. We expect from everyone to give 100% and continuously learn from the best.