Head of Partnerships, Riipen
United States
Experiential learning platform and marketplace
Open for applications
Experiential learning platform and marketplace
101-200 employees
Open for applications
101-200 employees
Company mission
To help students of all backgrounds and geographies boost their skills, gain career clarity, network with potential employers, and find jobs they love.
Role
Who you are
- A proven track record leading enterprise, high-ACV, multi-stakeholder sales in B2B SaaS + services, including complex, long-cycle pursuits
- A history of building trust with senior academic and workforce leaders quickly, including comfort navigating politics, ambiguity, and competing institutional priorities
- Experience shaping or selling multi-year transformation initiatives (e.g., curricular redesign, statewide programs, workforce pathways)
- Evidence of strong commercial judgment—balancing revenue opportunity, risk, operational feasibility, and institutional readiness
- You bring an enterprise leadership mindset—able to operate at executive altitude while driving disciplined execution across complex pursuits
- A track record as a player/coach building and scaling an agile sales team
- Experience in work-based learning, experiential learning, or related workforce/education impact models
- Experience working with government-funded workforce programs or policy-driven initiatives
- Familiarity with marketplace models or dual-sided platforms (educators/employers)
- A collaborative leadership style that elevates cross-functional partners, integrates multiple perspectives, and prioritizes enterprise outcomes over individual wins
- We ask that if you feel like you don’t check all the boxes but have the potential to learn what you don’t know, that you still apply!
What the job involves
- The Head of Partnerships (US) will lead Riipen’s enterprise sales motion across higher education and workforce partners—setting the direction for named-account strategy, shaping commercial narratives, and driving transformative new logo growth
- You will operate as both a strategic seller and the architect of a high-performance enterprise sales function, owning pursuit strategy for Riipen’s most complex, multi-stakeholder opportunities - with a strong concentration on acquisition of higher education partnerships
- You will collaborate closely with Riipen’s US ecosystem leader and cofounder to advance major ecosystem-led pursuits, ensuring alignment across strategic opportunities and GTM priorities
- Through disciplined sales leadership, executive-level engagement, and cross-functional orchestration, you will build and scale a predictable revenue engine that positions Riipen as the market leader in experiential learning and work-based learning innovation
- This role will include well defined collaboration points with Revenue leadership on the handoff of employer-led revenue opportunities and on how employer feedback informs post-sale improvements, ensuring seamless integration across the employer lifecycle
- Sell into the US higher-education and workforce ecosystems with credibility and depth—navigating cabinet-level decision cycles, funding models, procurement constraints, and complex stakeholder dynamics
- Engage and influence cabinet-level institutional and workforce leaders—Presidents, Provosts, VPs—building executive alignment around multi-year, outcomes-driven partnership models
- Work closely with our US ecosystem leader and co-founder on high-impact pursuits—aligning on strategy, strengthening value narratives, and supporting execution for major ecosystem-led opportunities
- Build and accelerate a healthy, predictable pipeline to drive new logo acquisition across a named-account sales motion, partnering with GTM Strategy & Solutions
- Drive disciplined qualification and deal inspection, bringing and enforcing a structured, qualification-driven sales methodology that increases predictability and improves win rates
- Lead cross-functional pursuit teams in collaboration with GTM Strategy, Product, Employer and Delivery to shape solutions, remove blockers, and advance complex opportunities
- Partner with Revenue Operations to maintain inspection-ready forecasts, pipeline discipline, and clean, reliable reporting
- Play an executive role in the region’s most strategic opportunities, supporting sellers and strengthening senior-level engagement where needed
- Own a material portion of Riipen’s new bookings target, delivering predictable enterprise revenue performance and shaping the standards of excellence for the sales organization
- Set the standard for enterprise selling excellence—modeling rigor, professionalism, preparation, and a consultative, outcomes-driven approach
Application process
- We appreciate your interest and application. Only those applicants under consideration will be contacted
- Application Received
- Internal Review
- Phone Interview with People and Culture
- Hiring Manager
- Final Interview
- Offer
- Hired and begin onboarding!
Our take
It’s a problem many graduates are painfully familiar with: you need experience to get a job, but you can’t land a job without experience. Riipen is a company helping to tackle this issue. Their platform offers post-secondary institutions the ability to connect their students to real-world problems and training, and to companies in search of new talent.
The company have helped over 100,000 students engage in applied learning, which historically might only have been accessed through an internship - typically freezing out students without the connections or resources to land one. So Riipen’s addressing inequality of opportunity in the post-secondary demographic, alongside streamlining the work of companies in sourcing talent.
With the economy still in recovery, and traditional ‘first job’ positions in certain industries curtailed, there’s an urgent need to reimagine what stepping onto the career ladder looks like. Riipen’s solution has been refined over the past several years, and is now well set to take advantage of this opportunity.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 3 rounds)
Jan 2021
$1.5m
LATE VC
Dec 2019
$3.8m
EARLY VC
Total funding: $6m
Company benefits
- Enhanced health & dental benefits
- Generous time off
- Choose your work environment
- Paid parental leave
- Paid learning opportunities
Company HQ
Downtown Vancouver, Vancouver, BC
Leadership
Dave Savory
(Co-Founder & VP of Experiential Learning)Previously a Franchise Manager at College Pro Painters, before moving on to work in Sales and Business Development at Travergence Interactive, and then Softree Technical Systems.
Dana Stephenson
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously held various managerial roles in recruitment, marketing, and business at The Acquisition Group Enterprises, Advanced Air Supply, and The Moore Law Group. Subsequently worked as a sales rep at Beldon Home Solutions.
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