Head of Strategic Hardware Partnerships
Gimlet · San Francisco
- On site
- Fulltime
- San Francisco
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Subject: Interested in the Head of Strategic Hardware Partnerships role at Gimlet
Hi Alex — I came across the Head of Strategic Hardware Partnerships opening and wanted to reach out directly. I've spent the last few years doing exactly this kind of work, and Gimlet stood out because…
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About the role
About Us
Gimlet is building the next generation of AI infrastructure: large-scale AI datacenters and the orchestration platform that coordinates them.
The future of AI will require vastly more compute than exists today. But as AI workloads become more complex and new hardware architectures emerge, simply deploying more GPUs isn't enough. The challenge is making increasingly diverse compute work together.
Gimlet's platform intelligently partitions and routes workloads across heterogeneous hardware, enabling step-function improvements in performance and efficiency. Customers deploy through production-grade APIs without needing to think about hardware selection, placement, or optimization.
We work with foundation labs, hyperscalers, and AI-native companies to power production workloads at massive scale and help define the infrastructure layer for the future of AI.
About the role
Gimlet Labs is seeking a Head of Strategic Hardware Partnerships to lead high-impact partnership discussions across the hardware, infrastructure, and AI systems ecosystem. This role will manage strategic opportunities, coordinate technical and commercial evaluation processes, and build long-term relationships with partners working on infrastructure acceleration, hardware/software co-design, deployment optimization, and AI systems integration.
The ideal candidate is highly relationship-oriented, technically fluent, and comfortable moving between business, product, engineering, and executive conversations. They should be able to create structure around ambiguous partnership opportunities while helping technical teams evaluate where collaboration can create real value.
What you will work on
Own Gimlet’s strategic relationships across the hardware ecosystem partners including silicon, storage, networking partners
Serve as Gimlet’s primary commercial counterpart to partner BD, partnerships, and executive teams.
Build joint partner roadmaps aligned to Gimlet’s deployment timelines, customer commitments, product strategy, and supply needs.
Identify ecosystem trends, partner capabilities, and collaboration models that improve performance, efficiency, supply access, or deployment outcomes.
Originate, structure, and negotiate strategic partnership agreements, commercials, and co-development frameworks from first conversation through signature.
Partner with engineering to run technical evaluations and benchmarks, translating results into commercial positioning, ROI models, vendor selection, and executive recommendations.
Coordinate across engineering, product, legal, finance, procurement, sales, and executive stakeholders to advance partnerships, support customer deals, and track status, blockers, decision points, and next steps.
You may be a good fit if
8–15 years in strategic partnerships, business development, or technical alliances within semiconductors, AI infrastructure, or adjacent hardware ecosystems.
Proven ability to originate and close hardware partnership deals, not just manage existing relationships or inbound opportunities.
Deep understanding of data center economics, including hardware pricing, allocation, lead times, supply commitments, and competitive dynamics across GPUs, wafer-scale systems, and custom accelerators.
Experience leading technical partnership processes with engineering teams, including vendor evaluations, POCs, benchmarks, and co-development discussions.
Credible across technical and commercial conversations, with the ability to engage senior executives, founders, and engineering leaders.
Experience building a partner motion from scratch at a growth-stage company; comfortable creating structure in ambiguity.
Strong candidates will also have
Direct relationships with BD/partnerships teams at leading hardware companies
Experience with AI inference infrastructure: disaggregated inference, KV cache optimization, prefill/decode separation, hardware/software co-design, or inference model serving at scale.
Experience managing partnerships with chip vendors, OEMs/ODMs, cloud providers, networking companies, or infrastructure platforms.
Familiarity with multi-vendor procurement and supply chain diversification strategies
Experience supporting commercial agreements, joint roadmaps, and co-development programs at a high-growth AI or infrastructure company.