Lead - Partner Deals

The role

Nebius is extending its AI data center capacity through local partners who own and operate the physical infrastructure, while Nebius provides its cloud software layer and brings the customers. This role owns partner deals end to end — from qualifying a prospective partner through to a signed definitive agreement and handover to deployment — orchestrating Nebius’s technical, financial, legal, and compliance teams so that each deal gets to signature.

You are the deal owner. You do not perform the underlying assessments yourself; you task the internal functions that do, synthesize their input, drive the commercial negotiation, and carry the partner to close.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Own a portfolio of partner deals in parallel, each at a different stage. Manage relationships with partner principals (founders, CEOs, CFOs) and intermediaries.
• Run partner qualification as a process: task the relevant internal functions — site and powered land, finance and creditworthiness, regulatory / export control / KYC, and technical feasibility — synthesize their input, and own the go/no-go decision against defined criteria.
• Lead commercial negotiations: term sheets, the commercial and fee structure, hardware payment terms, go-to-market commitments, exclusivity, and term — within a defined commercial framework, knowing what is fixed and what is negotiable.
• Own the interface with Finance on each deal’s model: ensure capex, fees, milestones, IRR, and payback are correctly reflected, and handle partner diligence on the model, clearly distinguishing spot vs. long-term and gross vs. net economics.
• Coordinate technical scoping with the architecture and infrastructure teams: bill of materials, data center standards alignment, storage and networking specifications, hardware procurement and payment terms. Turn engineering input into accurate partner-facing materials.
• Drive the legal and contracting workflow with Legal: NDAs, term sheets, and definitive agreements, and contribute to a standard partner agreement template.
• Own export-control and regulatory gating for each deal together with Compliance: US export controls (BIS/OFAC), licensing, and KYC.
• Run partner due-diligence Q&A end to end, technical and commercial, pulling in the right subject-matter experts and assembling the response.
• Maintain pipeline status and reporting. Triage inbound interest and route opportunities that fall outside this model to the right owner.
• Coordinate with Sales and with Government Relations / Communications as deals approach signature and launch.

To set expectations clearly, this role does not include:

• Personally assessing sites or powered land, or performing technical, financial/credit, or legal due diligence — these sit with the internal functions, which the role tasks and synthesizes.
• End-customer sales.
• Technical architecture or construction ownership.
• Strategic M&A or corporate financing.
• The wholesale / offtake track.

We expect you to have:

• A proven track record originating, structuring, and closing complex, multi-party commercial deals in infrastructure, data centers, energy, telecom, or project finance — deals involving capex, multi-year terms, and financing dependencies.
• Financial fluency sufficient to interrogate and weigh a project model in negotiation and to handle partner diligence (IRR, payback, capex, revenue-share; distinguishing spot vs. long-term and gross vs. net) — not to build the model.
• Enough technical fluency in infrastructure (compute/GPU, networking, storage, power and cooling) to coordinate engineers, catch errors in their input, and translate it for partners — not to do the engineering.
• Cross-functional program management: driving legal, finance, technical, and compliance workstreams to a deadline simultaneously.
• Working knowledge of export-control and sanctions regimes (BIS/OFAC), or the ability to get up to speed quickly.
• Precise written English and the ability to produce partner-facing documents without improvising or over-committing.
• Comfort working with C-level counterparts and intermediaries across multiple jurisdictions and time zones; willingness to travel.
• Discipline with sources: states only what is confirmed, flags estimates as preliminary, avoids general market claims, and does not over-promise.