Director, Channel & Partners

Our mission is to automate coding. The first step in our journey is to build the best tool for professional programmers, using a combination of inventive research, design, and engineering. Our organization is very flat, and our team is small and talent dense. We particularly like people who are truth-seeking, passionate, and creative. We enjoy spirited debate, crazy ideas, and shipping code. About the role Cursor is building its partner ecosystem across APJ, and this is a build-from-the-ground-up role at the centre of it. As the in-market partner builder for your market, you own the partner business end to end. You set the strategy, stand it up, and run it, all at the same time. You work as the business partner to the in-market Regional Vice President, turning their go-to-market priorities into partner-led pipeline and co-sell wins. Two engines drive the market, Technology partnerships and Transformation partnerships, both building on relationships Cursor already holds. Japan is a partner-first market. You cannot operate effectively without strong local partners, and this is the most pressing of our APJ in-market needs despite being at the earliest stage. This is a standing start: you will land Cursor's first local partners in Japan, open co-sell motions, and stand up FDE capacity in a market with no coverage today. This is a team of one in-market with a speed mandate. You report into the Director of Partnerships APJ, which keeps the craft and standards under partnerships without splitting your accountability to the market. This is an in-market role. You will spend a significant share of your time in person with partner principals, delivery teams, and customers across your market, and you will work closely with a small, high-talent-density global partnerships team that values in-person collaboration and fast, direct communication. What you'll do • Own the in-market partner business from concept to completion. Set the market partner strategy and sequencing from greenfield, then execute it personally. • Accelerate Cursor's global partners into your market and incubate them to productivity, across Technology and Transformation partnerships. • Where gaps exist, recruit, onboard, and manage local partners from the ground up. • Build and run co-sell motions, stand up FDE (forward deployed engineer) capacity, and drive C-level access and value-amplification programs through to landed wins. • Turn partner relationships into qualified pipeline and closed co-sell revenue that feeds the in-market RVP number. • Build the data picture for your market and use it to drive decisions, priorities, and forecasting. • Own the operating system that keeps it repeatable: reporting, tracking, tiering, onboarding flows, partner QBRs, and cadence. • Act as business partner to the in-market RVP, translating their go-to-market priorities into partner motion and giving them a clear, data-backed view of the business. • Take ambiguous problems, from routes to market and contracting to partner economics, co-sell mechanics, channel conflict, localisation, FDE accreditation, and customer access, and drive them to a working outcome without the path laid out for you. You may be a fit if • You are fluent in Japanese and deeply understand the local technology and services partner ecosystem, especially SIs/GSIs. In a partner-first market, this is essential. • You have professional working proficiency in English. You will engage consistently with HQ and present plans to English-speaking stakeholders, so you can operate and communicate confidently in English. Fluency in both Japanese and English is the highest-value combination for this role. • You are a builder-operator, a doer rather than a coordinator, energized by owning a business from greenfield and running it as it grows. • You have built and scaled technology, consulting, GSI, ideally in enterprise software, and carried a number against that work. • You are fluent across partner business plans, program mechanics, enablement, and co-sell economics, and comfortable being accountable for the outcomes. • You make decisions from data and can stand up the reporting and operating cadence yourself. • You build durable relationships with partner principals and alliance leads, the kind of person partners choose to invest behind. • You navigate negotiation and channel conflict with judgment, and you identify and influence the right internal and external people quickly. • You operate credibly across diverse markets and decision-making styles, and you move fast.