Director, Strategic Partnerships in New York at VGS

Every time you pay with a card online, tell an AI agent to book your flight, or trust an app with your data, something has to make that safe - invisibly, instantly, at scale. That’s VGS.

As a payments infrastructure platform powering enterprise merchants and agentic commerce, we enable high-growth enterprises to collect, tokenize and send sensitive data - including PII and Payment Data - while offloading the associated risk. Very Good Security (VGS) is the global leader in payment tokenization - securing over 8 billion payment tokens and powering over 80 billion API calls annually. Our modern tokenization platform operates as the silent backbone for critical transactions and elite brands, allowing our clients to innovate without constraint. We partner with the world’s largest card payment networks and cloud providers. And power some of the most recognizable AI companies, payment wallets, and enterprise retailers in the world.

We’re a rapidly growing Series C company, backed by top-tier investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Visa, Goldman Sachs, and Vertex Ventures.

Role Overview
The Director, Strategic Partnerships – Payments & Product will lead the expansion of VGS's strategic partner ecosystem - building relationships with card networks, investors, cloud providers, and emerging payments infrastructure players that directly shape our product strategy and platform capabilities.

This role blends external partner engagement with internal product collaboration. You’ll help shape our product roadmap by bringing ecosystem insights and partnership-led opportunities to life - whether through expanding our card network services, accelerating agentic tokens, or other innovative initiatives.

• Lead and develop a team of Strategic Partnerships professionals, including direct reports, setting clear priorities, coaching performance, and building the team’s capabilities as VGS’s partnership portfolio and strategic mandate expand.

• Own and grow a portfolio of VGS’s most strategic partnerships across payments and commerce technology, including card networks, investors, cloud and infrastructure providers, AI platforms, wallets, processors, and other ecosystem partners.

• Develop and execute partnership strategies that advance VGS’s company and product priorities, identifying where external partners can accelerate growth, strengthen product differentiation, or open new markets and distribution channels.

• Lead complex, product-oriented partnerships that require deep coordination across Product, Engineering, Legal, Sales, and Executive Leadership, translating strategic opportunities into executable commercial and technical plans.

• Source, evaluate, prioritize, and develop new strategic partnerships, with a focus on opportunities that can materially influence VGS’s product roadmap, competitive positioning, or long-term growth.

• Lead negotiations for strategic commercial and product agreements, including defining partnership structures, economics, go-to-market models, technical commitments, and mutual success criteria.

• Drive partnerships from initial strategy and business case through negotiation, launch, commercialization, and ongoing relationship management.

• Build senior-level relationships with partner executives and serve as a trusted strategic counterpart, identifying opportunities to expand the partnership and proactively addressing risks or areas of misalignment.

• Establish clear goals, operating rhythms, and success metrics for key partnerships, holding both VGS and partners accountable for execution and measurable outcomes.

• Act as the voice of strategic partners within VGS, bringing external market insights, partner priorities, and ecosystem developments into product and company decision-making.

• Influence VGS’s broader corporate and product strategy by developing a point of view on the evolution of tokenization, payments infrastructure, agentic commerce, AI, and next-generation commerce technologies.

• Identify emerging ecosystem shifts and translate them into actionable recommendations for VGS, including potential new products, partnerships, distribution models, and strategic initiatives.

• Represent VGS externally with senior leaders across the payments and technology ecosystem, strengthening VGS’s position as a strategic infrastructure partner for the next generation of commerce.

• 10+ years of experience in strategic partnerships, fintech BD, product strategy, or payments consulting

• Understanding of the payments ecosystem—issuers, processors, card networks, wallets, and commerce platforms

• Ability to connect technical product functionality with partner and market needs

• Demonstrated success managing complex partnerships and cross-functional projects

• Comfortable in ambiguous, fast-paced environments with shifting priorities and emerging technologies

• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with a strategic mindset and a bias toward execution
  
  

Nice to Have

• Experience working closely with product or engineering teams in a platform company or fintech infrastructure provider, especially in an innovative and fast paced startup environment

• Familiarity with tokenization, payment flows, reconciliation processes, or data compliance frameworks

• Technical literacy (e.g., comfortable discussing APIs, SDKs, and integration workflows)