Channel Sales Manager, CIQ
Enterprise-grade open source software infrastructure
Be an early applicant
Enterprise-grade open source software infrastructure
101-200 employees
Be an early applicant
101-200 employees
Company mission
To simplify and unify software infrastructure, enabling customers to craft ground breaking technologies for generations to come.
Role
Who you are
- A genuine self-starter mindset, comfortable operating with ambiguity, and a near-blank slate
- Strong commercial instincts, with the ability to negotiate partner economics and defend margin
- Credibility with both partner executives and partner field reps
- The discipline to run their book on numbers, not relationships alone
- A hands-on operator’s approach, doing the work directly (outreach, partner conversations, enablement sessions, negotiations) rather than delegating it
- A friendly, collaborative, humble, honest, and always striving to be better attitude
- Bachelor’s degree or equivalent relevant work experience
- 8+ years of experience in channel, partner, or alliances sales, ideally in infrastructure, open source, or enterprise software
- A track record of personally building partner relationships that produced real revenue (not solely managing a team that did)
- Experience standing up or materially growing partner program mechanics: tiering, deal registration, margin models, and enablement
What the job involves
- As Senior Channel Manager, you will own CIQ’s channel-led revenue as an individual contributor, reporting directly to the company’s sales leadership. You will build and run CIQ’s partner motion across three fronts: recruiting new channel partners, developing and enabling existing partners, and managing distributor relationships. Every partner activity ties back to sourced and influenced revenue.
- Identify, qualify, and recruit new channel partners (resellers, VARs, SIs, MSPs) whose customer base and technical focus align with Rocky Linux, RLC, and the broader CIQ portfolio; build the recruitment pipeline, run outreach, and close partner agreements directly
- Develop existing partners into producing partners through seller and SE enablement, joint business planning, co-marketing and demand-generation coordination, and accountability to mutually agreed targets; diagnose why partners are not selling and fix it
- Own distributor relationships and economics, including transactional flow, margin, and incentive structures, and using distributor reach to extend partner recruitment without CIQ carrying all the overhead
- Define and run the program mechanics: partner tiers, deal registration, the margin model, enablement, and the metrics that govern them
- Work cross-functionally with direct sales (to manage channel conflict and run co-sell), marketing (partner demand generation), and product (to feed partner and market signal back)
- Carry and forecast a channel-sourced and influenced pipeline contribution
Our take
Development of the Community Enterprise Linux Operating System (CentOS) was dropped by IBM’s RedHat in just 2020, leaving a gaping hole in the market. When CIQ’s founders swept in to offer a replacement, Rocky Linux, and a complementary support and servicing company CIQ, the demand reportedly skyrocketed - and, according to CIQ, it hasn’t subsided since.
That’s because the old CentOS was one of the principal OSs used by enterprise, cloud, VMs, and containers - Google, for example, was among one of its many enterprise users. Now Google has picked up Rocky Linux, and CIQ has consequently scooped up that major partnership too - and some healthy funding. It’s a fitting reward for a highly savvy play from the CIQ founders, picking up a tried-and-tested product that’s already achieved strong market penetration.
Besides Rocky Linux, CIQ has also developed cluster provisioning solution Warewulf, high performance computing (HPC) app containers tool Apptainer, and hybrid performance computing platform-as-a-Service Fuzzball. So it’s safe to say that CIQ has managed to skilfully manoeuvre its way into a pivotal position in the development of cutting edge high performance computing architecture. Now it will need to ensure it can capitalize on its lead.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
56% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (2 rounds)
May 2022
$26m
SERIES A
Jan 2021
$4m
SERIES A
Total funding: $30m
Company HQ
North Valleys, Reno, NV
Leadership
Gregory Kurtzer
(Co-Founder & CEO)Spent over 16 years as a System Architect, Technical Lead, and Scientific Advisor at Berkeley Lab, before moving into a Corporate Advisor role at RStor. Alongside this, also founded and served as CEO at Sylabs.
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