Director, Partner Onboarding and Activation

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Director, Partner Onboarding and Activation based in Canada. This is a high-impact leadership role responsible for owning the end-to-end partner onboarding journey from contract signature through activation, first value, and stable billing. You will lead a multi-team function spanning partner care, platform activation, and technical migrations. As the single point of accountability for onboarding outcomes during the first 90 days, you will bring together Sales, Product, Support, Finance, Software Development, and other teams around one operating model. The role combines strategic transformation with hands-on operational leadership, using data, partner feedback, automation, and process discipline to improve the onboarding experience. You will help reduce partner effort, accelerate time-to-value, and create a consistent path to long-term success. This is an opportunity to build and scale a world-class onboarding organization within a fast-paced cloud and SaaS environment. Own and continuously evolve the end-to-end onboarding strategy, creating differentiated onboarding journeys based on partner size, maturity, complexity, technical requirements, and business needs. Serve as the single point of accountability for onboarding execution, establishing operating rhythms, performance metrics, service levels, and governance mechanisms that ensure consistent, efficient, and high-quality delivery. Orchestrate cross-functional handoffs between Sales, Onboarding, Product, Software Development, Support, Account Management, Finance, and other teams to create a seamless partner experience. Drive partner activation and first value by ensuring critical milestones—including migrations, first platform transactions, and accurate first billing—are achieved on schedule. Monitor onboarding progress, partner readiness, customer effort, and risk signals, proactively addressing blockers and escalating issues to ensure successful outcomes. Lead continuous improvement and transformation initiatives across onboarding, leveraging Voice of Customer insights, automation, self-service tools, guided workflows, training, and improved processes to reduce friction and accelerate time-to-value. Own onboarding frameworks, playbooks, tools, metrics, and reporting, treating the onboarding journey as an evolving product that continuously improves based on partner feedback and business outcomes. Lead and develop team leaders responsible for technical and partner success functions, providing coaching, setting clear expectations, establishing capacity models, and fostering a culture of accountability, collaboration, and growth. Scale team capabilities in line with business growth by supporting recruitment, developing future leaders, and embedding consistent onboarding best practices. Represent onboarding strategy and performance at senior leadership level, providing clear insights, recommendations, and updates on operational performance, partner experience, risks, and transformation priorities. Requirements: 7–10+ years of experience in Customer Success, Partner Enablement, Onboarding, or related post-sales leadership roles, with experience managing people leaders or senior specialists. Demonstrated success influencing and aligning cross-functional teams, including situations where outcomes must be achieved without direct authority. Experience in SaaS, cloud platforms, managed service providers, channel/partner ecosystems, or IT services is strongly preferred. Strong combination of strategic thinking and operational discipline, with the ability to design scalable processes while establishing the metrics, governance, and accountability required for reliable execution. Exceptional leadership, communication, facilitation, and stakeholder-management skills, including the ability to engage effectively with executive audiences. Strong business judgmen