Program Manager, Strategic Partnerships

Who We Are

At Justworks, you’ll enjoy a welcoming and casual environment, great benefits, wellness program offerings, company retreats, and the ability to interact with and learn from leaders in the startup community. We work hard and care about our most prized asset - our people.

We’re helping businesses get off the ground by enabling them to focus on running their business. We solve HR issues. We’re data-driven and never stop iterating. If you’d like to work in a supportive, entrepreneurial environment, are interested in building something meaningful and having fun while doing it, we’d love to hear from you.

We're united by shared goals and shared motivations at Justworks. These are best summed up in our company values, which are reflected in our product and in our team.

Our Values

If this sounds like you, you’ll fit right in.

About the Role

Justworks is looking for a Strategic Partnerships Program Manager to help turn our most important partnerships into scalable, successful growth opportunities.

Sitting within Revenue Strategy, this individual contributor role will work closely with our Partnerships and Business Development teams to translate complex partnership opportunities into coordinated execution plans and measurable business outcomes.

Bringing a partnership to life often requires many parts of the business to move together—from designing the customer journey and go-to-market motion to enabling product and technology capabilities, operational processes, financial models, marketing programs, and reporting. You will serve as the cross-functional quarterback for these initiatives, connecting the strategy and commercial intent of a partnership with the teams and capabilities required to successfully launch it.

We’re looking for someone who combines strong strategic thinking and commercial instincts with exceptional project management and cross-functional leadership. You can take an ambiguous, complex opportunity, break it into a clear plan, anticipate what could get in the way, and drive a diverse group of stakeholders toward a shared outcome.

What You’ll Do

• Serve as the cross-functional quarterback for high-priority partnership initiatives, driving execution from deal development and agreement through launch and stabilization.
• Partner closely with Partnerships and Business Development leaders to understand the strategic and commercial objectives of each opportunity and translate them into clear execution plans.
• Build and manage comprehensive project plans across multiple workstreams, establishing owners, milestones, dependencies, decision points, risks, and success measures.
• Drive coordinated execution across the teams required to bring each partnership to life, creating clarity on responsibilities and holding stakeholders accountable to commitments and timelines.
• Anticipate dependencies and risks, remove blockers, and drive the decisions and tradeoffs required to keep initiatives moving.
• Connect decisions across workstreams, ensuring changes in one part of the business are understood and addressed across the broader initiative.
• Establish effective operating rhythms for each initiative, bringing together the right stakeholders at the right moments while avoiding unnecessary meetings and process.
• Maintain a clear, current view of initiative health and provide concise, decision-oriented updates to stakeholders and senior leaders across Partnerships, Revenue, Product, Marketing, etc.on progress, risks, dependencies, and next steps.
• Use AI and automation to improve how you manage complex initiatives—including maintaining project and workstream status, synthesizing information across teams, identifying risks and overdue dependencies, preparing meeting materials, and drafting recurring stakeholder and executive updates.
• Capture learnings from launches and develop repeatable approaches that improve how Justworks executes complex partnerships over time.

Who You Are

You are a strategic, commercially minded operator who thrives at the intersection of strategy and execution. You are equally comfortable understanding the business rationale behind a partnership and getting into the details required to make it work.

You are an exceptional project manager, but your impact goes beyond maintaining a project plan. You understand the objective, ask the questions others haven’t considered, connect decisions across workstreams, and create the clarity and accountability required to move complex initiatives forward.

You are comfortable operating without formal authority across teams with different priorities. You build credibility quickly, communicate clearly, hold people accountable, and know when to push for a decision or escalate a risk.

You are also a modern operator who actively uses AI and automation to reduce administrative work, improve visibility, and create more time for problem-solving and higher-value strategic work.

Qualifications

• 5-7 years of experience in management consulting, partnerships, business development, strategy & operations, strategic programs, or a related field.
• Strong project and program management experience, with demonstrated success leading complex, multi-workstream initiatives involving senior stakeholders across multiple functions.
• Partnerships experience is required: you have worked directly on partner-facing deals, alliances, or partner programs, or worked closely alongside Partnerships or Business Development teams on them.
• Demonstrated ability to translate ambiguous strategic or commercial opportunities into structured execution plans with clear ownership, milestones, dependencies, and outcomes.
• Experience driving execution across a broad range of stakeholders, such as Product, Engineering, Marketing, Sales, Customer Success and Support, Revenue Operations, Finance, Legal, and Corporate Strategy.
• Strong commercial and analytical judgment, with the ability to understand business models, customer journeys, go-to-market motions, and partnership economics.
• Proven ability to anticipate risks, resolve blockers, drive decisions, and maintain accountability across teams without direct authority.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to synthesize complex work into concise executive-level updates, decisions, and recommendations.
• Strong judgment about when structure and process are necessary—and when they are getting in the way of execution.
• Fluency with AI and automation tools and demonstrated experience using them to improve personal productivity, project management, communication, and information synthesis.
• Ability to thrive in a fast-moving environment where the path from strategy to execution may not already be defined.

What Success Looks Like

Our most important partnership opportunities move from agreement to execution with speed, clarity, and accountability. The teams required to deliver each partnership understand what is expected of them, dependencies are identified early, decisions happen quickly, and leadership has clear visibility into progress and risk.

Our Partnerships and Business Development teams have a strong execution partner who can take a complex deal and quarterback the organization required to deliver it—allowing them to stay focused on building and growing strategic partner relationships.

Over time, Justworks becomes better and faster at bringing increasingly complex partnerships to market without adding unnecessary process or organizational complexity.

The base wage range for this position based in our New York City Office is targeted at $121,000.00 to $151,000.00 per year.

#LI-Hybrid #LI-JM1

Actual compensation is based on multiple factors that are unique to each candidate, including and not limited to skill set, level of relevant experience, and specific work location.  Salary ranges for positions based in other locations may differ based on the cost of labor in that location. 

For more information about Justworks’ Total Reward Philosophy, including all of the perks and benefits we are proud to offer our team members, please visit Total Rewards @ Justworks. 

Diversity At Justworks

Justworks is committed to maintaining a workplace where diversity of identity, culture, and life experience is the norm and is celebrated authentically and respected consistently. Diversity in our work, our people, and our product drives creativity and innovation, entrepreneurial leadership and integrity, competitiveness, and collaboration throughout our business and in the market. We depend on our differences to make our team stronger, our workplace more dynamic, and our product accessible to all of our customers.

We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer open to all qualified applicants regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital or familial status, disability, pregnancy, gender identity or expression, veteran status, genetic information, or any other legally protected status. Justworks is fully dedicated to providing necessary support to candidates with disabilities who may require reasonable accommodations. We also provide reasonable accommodations to employees based on their sincerely held religious beliefs, as well as for other covered reasons consistent with applicable federal, state, and local laws. If you're in need of a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at [email protected]. Your comfort and success matter to us, and we're here to ensure an inclusive experience.

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