Director of AI Ecosystem & Partnerships, Justworks
$265-342.5k
OTE
$212-274k
BASE
Senior and Expert level
New York
Remote from US
Business operations platform
Be an early applicant
Business operations platform
1001+ employees
FintechB2BEnterpriseHRCompliancePaymentsSaaS
Be an early applicant
$265-342.5k
OTE
$212-274k
BASE
Senior and Expert level
New York
Remote from US
1001+ employees
FintechB2BEnterpriseHRCompliancePaymentsSaaS
Company mission
To help entrepreneurs and businesses grow with confidence.
Role
Who you are
- You have 8–12+ years of experience in strategic partnerships, business development, platform ecosystems, corporate strategy, product strategy, GTM strategy, or a related role
- You have experience working with or within platform ecosystems, such as SaaS platforms, marketplaces, API ecosystems, developer platforms, or emerging AI platforms
- You understand the AI landscape to separate durable strategic shifts from hype, including LLMs, AI agents, copilots, AI search, and emerging enterprise workflows
- You are a structured thinker who can take an ambiguous opportunity and turn it into a clear strategy, roadmap, business case, or executive narrative
- You are commercially oriented and can connect ecosystem activity to pipeline, revenue, adoption, retention, or strategic positioning
- You can operate cross-functionally across Product, Marketing, Sales, Partnerships, and senior leadership without needing perfect ownership lines
- You are comfortable working directly with data, market signals, partner inputs, and customer insights to make practical recommendations
- You are a strong communicator who can present with clarity and conviction to executives, partners, and internal teams
- You have a builder mindset: you are energized by creating structure where none exists and turning early signals into scalable operating models
- You are genuinely curious about how AI will change software discovery, business workflows, and the way companies choose and adopt tools
What the job involves
- Justworks is building for the future of work — and increasingly, that work is happening inside AI platforms, agentic workflows, and new software ecosystems
- We’re looking for a Director, AI Ecosystem & Partnerships to define and lead how Justworks shows up across the rapidly evolving AI landscape. Today, we have several promising but fragmented efforts underway, including early AI integrations, API expansion, emerging platform relationships, and new thinking around AI-driven discovery
- This role will bring those threads together into a cohesive commercial strategy that drives visibility, preference, and adoption for Justworks within AI platforms and among the companies building on them
- This is a high-visibility, high-judgment role for someone who can operate across strategy and execution. You will work closely with Product, Partnerships, Marketing, Sales, and senior leadership to translate a fast-moving AI ecosystem into clear choices, prioritized investments, and measurable business outcomes
- The mandate is simple: help ensure Justworks is not only integrated into the next generation of workflows, but discovered, recommended, trusted, and adopted by the businesses using them
- Develop a unified strategy for how Justworks wins within AI platforms, agentic workflows, and emerging software ecosystems
- Translate fragmented efforts across integrations, APIs, partnerships, AI discovery, and go-to-market into a clear roadmap with measurable outcomes
- Identify where Justworks should invest, partner, build, or experiment to increase visibility and adoption in AI-driven customer journeys
- Build executive-ready recommendations that connect AI ecosystem opportunities to commercial impact, customer value, and long-term strategic positioning
- Own and develop relationships with frontier AI labs, AI platforms, developer ecosystems, and other strategic partners
- Identify opportunities for commercial partnerships, co-marketing, marketplace placement, featured integrations, and ecosystem distribution
- Ensure Justworks is not only technically integrated, but visible, trusted, and prioritized within relevant partner ecosystems
- Represent Justworks externally with the credibility and judgment required to engage senior partner stakeholders
- Partner with Marketing to evolve traditional search and content strategies into AI discovery and Answer Engine Optimization approaches
- Help define how Justworks should appear in AI-generated experiences, recommendations, and customer research workflows
- Develop messaging, campaigns, and channel strategies tailored to AI-first startups, technology companies, and businesses adopting AI-native workflows
- Turn AI platform visibility, customer behavior, and ecosystem data into practical recommendations for Sales, Marketing, and Product
- Collaborate with Product and Engineering on integrations, API capabilities, and platform requirements that support AI ecosystem adoption
- Translate partner needs, customer workflows, and market signals into clear product insights and prioritization inputs
- Help evaluate which technical investments are most likely to create commercial leverage
- Bridge business strategy and technical execution without needing to be the technical owner
- Define success metrics across platform visibility, partner-sourced pipeline, AI-driven acquisition, ecosystem placement, and revenue contribution
- Build business cases that help leadership evaluate trade-offs, resource needs, and investment priorities
- Turn early experiments into repeatable growth motions
- Develop reusable frameworks, narratives, and operating models that help internal teams understand and act on AI ecosystem opportunities
- What Success Looks Like
- In this role, success means Justworks has a clear, focused, and commercially grounded AI ecosystem strategy. Within your first year, you will have helped the company:
- Align fragmented AI-related efforts into a prioritized roadmap
- Establish meaningful relationships with the AI platforms and ecosystems most relevant to Justworks
- Increase visibility and discoverability in AI-driven customer journeys
- Identify and launch partnership or platform motions that create measurable pipeline, adoption, or revenue impact
- Give Product, Marketing, Sales, and Partnerships a shared language for where AI ecosystem opportunities matter — and where they do not
- Build the foundation for Justworks to become a trusted HR, payroll, and workforce solution within the next generation of software workflows
Our take
Justworks operates in an increasingly crowded space of all-in-one business operation suites, that include tools like human resources, payroll, employee management, benefits, and others that businesses critically need to operate as they scale.
Globally, human resource management has become an extremely fertile field, creating great opportunity for Justworks to continue to grow. The company is regarded as a market leader, but does see competition in the shape of Paychex Flex, Rippling, Paylocity, and TriNet, among others.
Justworks' solutions have proven extremely popular with SMEs, and this has not gone unnoticed by investors - with the company picking up considerable amounts of funding. The company is known to have sights on going public, though these were delayed somewhat by market conditions. That said, it has continued to expand operations and acquired Via in 2024, signalling that its going strong.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Top investors
24% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
Nov 2023
$16.9m
LATE VC
Jan 2020
$50m
SERIES E
Total funding: $159.9m
Company benefits
- Paid volunteer work
- Paid parental leave
- Work from home opportunities
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance, plus access to One Medical, Kindbody, and Teladoc
- Premium access to Headspace, ClassPass stipends, and webinars to support your overall wellness on topics like nutrition, budgeting, mindfulness, and more
- All Justworks offers include equity, and Justworkers can continue to earn more over time with promotions and tenure
- Extensive learning & development opportunities through workshops, ExecOnline, Udemy, and BetterUp coaching
- Apprenticeship program that supports internal movement and growth
Company HQ
Fulton Ferry District, NY
Leadership
Isaac Oates
(Founder & Director)Experience as a Senior Product Manager at Amazon before founding Adtuitive and serving as COO for a year. Left this position to spend 3 years as a VP at Etsy, before founding Justworks.
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