Strategic Partnerships Executive

Raleigh, NC | In-office | Reports to COO | Full-time

Hey — Scot here, CEO and co-founder of ReFiBuy. If you love going from zero-to-one — building the partner motion before there's a playbook, signing the first 10 deals that set the pattern for the next 100 — keep reading. Let's dig in.

A few quick notes up front:

• No recruiters, please.
• Applicants must have permanent work authorization in the US. We're not sponsoring visas for this role.
• This is an in-office role. We're default in-office in Raleigh, NC. If you're not in the Triangle, you'd need to relocate at your own expense — we don't have a relocation budget for this seat.
• Approximately 25% travel for partner meetings and industry events.

The opportunity

We're hiring our first Strategic Partnerships Executive to build ReFiBuy's partner ecosystem from the ground up. This is a high-impact, foundational role for someone who wants to architect the partner motion of an emerging category leader — defining who we partner with, how we go to market together, and how we drive measurable customer and revenue outcomes through the ecosystem.

You'll report directly to the COO and work cross-functionally with sales, marketing, and product to source, sign, onboard, and grow strategic relationships across three priority partner segments:

• Systems integrators, digital agencies, and consultancies advising brands and retailers on commerce and digital transformation.
• Ecommerce SaaS and technology providers whose platforms intersect with the AI commerce stack — ecommerce platforms, PIM, search, personalization, retail media.
• AI platforms and commerce destinations that are reshaping how consumers discover and buy products.

What You'll Do

• Own the full partnership lifecycle end-to-end: prospecting and qualification, business case development, negotiation, contracting, and launch.
• Build and prioritize a target partner list grounded in clear strategic rationale. Develop crisp business cases that articulate the customer value, revenue potential, and strategic fit of each pursuit.
• Lead partner onboarding and ongoing success: enablement, joint go-to-market planning, co-selling motions, marketing activation, and business reviews.
• Drive sourced and influenced pipeline through partners, in lockstep with our Sales and Solutions Engineering team.
• Serve as the internal voice of the partner ecosystem — aligning sales, marketing, and product around shared priorities and surfacing partner-driven product feedback.
• Represent ReFiBuy at industry events, partner summits, and ecosystem conferences: ShopTalk, NRF, partner-hosted events.
• Build the foundational systems, processes, playbooks, and partner program structure that will scale a high-performing partnerships organization as we grow.

What You'll Bring

• 5+ years in strategic partnerships, channel sales, business development, or alliances — ideally in ecommerce, retail tech, SaaS, or AI.
• Demonstrated track record of sourcing, signing, and operationalizing partnerships that produced measurable pipeline and revenue impact.
• Experience leading complex, multi-stakeholder negotiations with clarity, structure, and commercial rigor.
• Strong project management chops — you can run multiple partner workstreams in parallel without dropping the ball, and bring discipline to ambiguous, fast-moving situations.
• Excellent written and verbal communication. You can move fluently from a CEO-level conversation to a working-level enablement session and adjust your message for each.
• Bias toward action. You operate with startup pace, ownership, and resourcefulness — and you're energized by building from zero to one.
• Willingness to travel 25% for partner meetings and industry events.

How We Work

Builder culture: fast iterations, real ownership, daily shipping. We're in the office because the best work happens shoulder-to-shoulder. Fewer meetings, more co-creation, and a high bar for the quality of every partnership we put our name on.

Why ReFiBuy

Build the partner ecosystem of an emerging category leader at the intersection of AI and commerce — one of the most consequential platform shifts in retail in a decade.

Work directly with proven ecommerce founders Scot Wingo and Derek Conlin, alongside an experienced team of operators with deep domain expertise.

Be the architect of how ReFiBuy goes to market through partners, with the autonomy and influence that comes with a foundational hire.

Benefits

We're a seed-stage startup, and we've put real benefits in place — here's the deal:

• Healthcare — Three BCBS plans to choose from. ReFiBuy covers 80% of the base plan; you cover 20%.
• Dental, Vision, and Life Insurance — available alongside the medical plans.
• 401k through Human Interest, with a company match: 100% of contributions up to 1% of salary plus 50% up to 5%. No vesting — it's yours from day one.
• Incentive Stock Options (ISOs) — you're getting in on the ground floor. 4-year vesting, quarterly.
• PTO — 15 days (120 hours) per year, accruing each pay period. PTO can be used as it accrues, carries over year-to-year up to a 120-hour cap, and unused PTO is paid out at the end of your service.
• Parking — covered by ReFiBuy.
• Office — Raleigh. Founded at 509 W. North St, Raleigh, NC 27603. Glenwood South location, walking distance to restaurants and amenities, with a spacious breakroom, hangout areas, a wellness room, and more.

Note: Benefits are eligible 30 days after start.

About ReFiBuy

ReFiBuy is the Agentic Commerce Optimization (ACO) platform for brands, retailers, and agencies. We exist to help commerce teams compete and win in a world where AI shopping agents — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, and whatever ships next month — increasingly decide what gets discovered, recommended, and purchased.

The tools that power ecommerce today were never designed for agents. Product visibility used to depend on people typing keywords; now it depends on whether your product data is complete, structured, and intelligible to machines. We built ReFiBuy from the ground up as an AI-native, closed-loop platform — our Commerce Intelligence Engine ingests catalogs at the SKU level, evaluates how agentic engines interpret each product, enriches the gaps, distributes optimized data back to the engines, and monitors performance over time.

We were founded by four ecommerce operators with serious mileage — ChannelAdvisor, Rithum, MikMak, and Walmart — which makes us one of the most experienced AI startups in the Triangle. We're working with real brands and retailers on real catalogs, today.

Speed-wise: compared to a traditional company you'll feel like you're going 100x faster. Compared to a typical startup, 10–20x. If you like to build great and fast, be innovative, go home exhausted from learning so much, and ship work where the impact is immediate — you're going to love it here.

If this sounds like your kind of room, send us your resume and a few links to things you've shipped. We read everything. That's it for now — looking forward to meeting you.

— Scot Wingo, CEO