Head of Partner Management, Affiliate Channel

About the role

Shopify's affiliate channel is a critical engine for new merchant acquisition. This is a senior leadership role on the Affiliate team. You'll own the partner portfolio strategy, setting the vision for partnership growth and build the playbook for how Shopify wins with affiliate content driving LLM-driven discovery. You'll lead a cross-regional team of partner managers across the US and EU. You will also directly manage a small subset of top partners. This role sits at the intersection of performance marketing, partner strategy, and emerging technology. If you thrive on ambiguity, move fast, and know how to build trust-based relationships at scale in a B2B environment, this is the role.

What you'll do:

Portfolio Strategy & Optimization

• Own the affiliate partner portfolio strategy: segmentation, tier design, partner mix, and portfolio-level performance targets tied to new merchant acquisition
• Decide which affiliates and partner types to invest in and where the market is shifting and how it fits Shopify's ideal customer profile
• Understand the second and third order effects of major portfolio decisions including publisher mix shifts, payout structure changes, and attribution model updates, and use that analysis to drive better outcomes
• Leverage complex, multi-dimensional data to size incremental impact and surface tradeoffs clearly to leadership
• Manage a small set of top-tier partners directly, staying close to the craft, keeping a pulse on how the market is evolving, and bringing those insights back to sharpen the broader strategy
• Continuously analyze portfolio performance to identify trends, inflection points, and emerging opportunities across regions, partner types, and content formats.
• Diagnose the drivers behind material changes in performance (e.g., shifts in traffic mix, payout changes, merchant conversion, or external market dynamics) and translate findings into clear actions.
• Build and maintain regular performance review cadences (dashboards, deep-dives, post-mortems) that separate signal from noise and inform portfolio rebalancing.

AI-Forward Affiliate Strategy

• Develop a clear point of view and actionable roadmap for how LLMs and AI-native surfaces are reshaping affiliate attribution, partner categories, and acquisition pathways
• Partner cross-functionally with internal teams to build a strategy around content categories where Shopify has a clear right to win in LLM-driven discovery and operationalize it across the partner base
• Identify where Shopify should place early bets on AI-driven partner structures before the category matures, and take measurable risks with high-reward potential

Team Leadership

• Lead, develop, and grow a cross-regional team of partner and recruitment managers across the US and EU
• Hold a high quality bar, invest in craft development, and model the culture you want to see
• Be active in attracting top talent: participate in recruiting, assess candidates, and build long-term team capability as the channel grows

Operational Rigor & Stakeholder Communication

• Build tracking mechanisms that drive accountability and align the team's day-to-day work to channel-level targets
• Synthesize complex affiliate performance and strategy into crisp, compelling narratives for senior leadership
• Ensure partner management and recruitment strategy consistently ladders up to new merchant growth goals, and escalate proactively when off-track with proposed solutions
• Create simple, transparent frameworks for explaining performance variance and tradeoffs to senior leaders and cross-functional stakeholders.

What You Bring

• Deep subject matter expertise in affiliate marketing, performance partnerships, or publisher development, enough to teach others and spot what's shifting before it's obvious
• B2B experience required: you understand the sales cycle, partner economics, and merchant journey dynamics specific to business audiences, and you've built or managed affiliate programs that drive B2B acquisition at scale
• Proven track record owning a partner portfolio with measurable outcomes tied to new customer or merchant acquisition
• Experience leading and developing a cross-regional team with a demonstrated ability to hold a high bar while coaching people to grow
• Strong data fluency across attribution, incrementality, and channel economics
• Excellent storytelling with the ability to synthesize complexity into crisp narratives for senior audiences
• Demonstrated ability to dissect complex performance data, identify root causes of variance, and turn insights into concrete strategic and tactical changes.
• Ability to operate autonomously on high-value, ambiguous problems and bring others with you