Partnerships Manager, Dodo Payments

About the Opportunity
- Dodo Payments is a Merchant of Record for developers and digital businesses selling globally. This role owns relationships with payment processors and rails, as well as agencies, dev shops, and platforms that bring merchants to Dodo. One side lowers payment costs; the other grows merchant reach.
- You’ll be Dodo’s first full-time partnerships hire. Today, these relationships are handled deal-by-deal by founders and revenue teams. You’ll turn them into a scalable function: a rail coverage map, a partner program with clear tiers and economics, and a pipeline on both sides.

Role & Responsibilities
- Own rail partnerships: map current collection and payout coverage by country, currency, and payment method; identify gaps; decide which partner closes each gap.
- Source and negotiate full-cycle deals with processors, acquirers, APM providers, payout and FX rails, and banking partners — including MDR, FX spreads, settlement timelines, reserves, and volume commitments.
- Own onboarding of new rails: collaborate with compliance on KYB and due diligence, and with engineering on integration timelines until first live transaction.
- Track and optimize partner health and cost: monitor cost, approval rates, uptime, settlement delays, and escalations for every live rail; reduce blended payment cost by corridor quarter over quarter.
- Design partner program: build tiers for referral partners, agencies, dev shops, and technology platforms — each with clear economics (revenue share, referral fees) and a standard agreement.
- Qualify inbound partner requests quickly and proactively source outbound partners who already reach target merchants.
- Activate partners: create onboarding kits, pitch materials, deal registration, and seamless handoff to sales so signed partners send their first merchant live within weeks.
- Track partner-sourced revenue: monitor every merchant from referral to live volume; ensure partners are paid correctly and on time.
- Maintain competitive intelligence: know who’s launching what, who’s pricing aggressively, and which rails and partners competitors rely on.

Skills & Qualifications
Must-Have
- 3 to 5 years in partnerships, alliances, banking relationships, or payments BD at a payment aggregator, PSP, cross-border fintech, neobank, or B2B SaaS company with a real partner program.
- Hands-on experience negotiating commercial deals with processors, banks, payout providers, or channel partners — not just attending meetings.
- Experience building or scaling a partner or referral program and ability to show what it generated.
- Working fluency in payments mechanics: MDR and interchange, settlement cycles, FX spreads, chargebacks, rolling reserves, KYB.
- Comfort reading partner agreements and identifying clauses that cost the company money.
- Proven ability to turn messy work into trackers, scorecards, or SOPs without being asked.
Preferred
- Bonus: exposure to cross-border flows (RBI PA-CB, international payouts, APMs in SEA, MENA, LATAM, or Europe).
- Experience with partners like Wise, Payoneer, Airwallex, Adyen, Worldpay, or Stripe.
- Experience recruiting agencies and dev shops as resellers.

Loaction & Highlights
- Location: Bangalore, in-office.
- Travel: occasional for partner meetings and industry events.