Who You Are

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.

Your Success Profile

What You Will Work On

Define and lead Justworks’ commercial AI ecosystem strategy

• 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.

Build and scale strategic AI partnerships

• 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.

Drive AI-native go-to-market and discovery

• 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.

Partner closely with Product and Engineering

• 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.

Create commercial impact and operating leverage

• 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.

 

Qualifications

• 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 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.

Why This Role Matters

One of Justworks’ core product priorities is to help customers get work done where they are already working. Increasingly, that includes AI platforms, AI assistants, and agentic workflows.

Integration alone will not be enough. To win in this next phase, Justworks needs to become:

• A trusted partner within relevant AI ecosystems.
• A visible and recommended solution in AI-generated experiences.
• A natural choice for AI-native and technology-forward businesses managing their teams.
• A company that can translate AI ecosystem change into practical commercial advantage.

This role is critical to making that vision real.

 

This position is paid a base wage plus incentive compensation. The base wage range for this position is targeted at $212,000 - $274,000 in our New York City office, and competitive On-Target Earnings, inclusive of incentive compensation, of $53,000 - $68,500.  Final offers may vary from those listed. *Incentive compensation is not guaranteed, and earning is subject to the terms and conditions of the applicable incentive compensation plan.

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