Head of Data Partnership

Head of Data Partnerships

Location: Waltham, MA | Vancouver, WA | Bethesda, MD | Remote (US) (Hybrid)

ZoomInfo is seeking a Head of Data Partnerships to own how we grow our data advantage through external relationships. Our advantage is built on what we acquire as much as what we build - and this role owns the full range of ways we acquire: what we license, what we co-develop, what we trade for, what we sell alongside, and what we should own outright.

Most of this is buying data, and buying it well. You will run a portfolio of hundreds of suppliers spanning company, contact, identity, and signal data across global markets - deciding which partners we invest in, which we consolidate, and which we walk away from, accountable for the coverage, accuracy, and unit economics of the whole thing. But the highest-value work is not a purchase order. It is the first-look arrangement that keeps a category away from a competitor. The revenue share that turns a cost line into a business. The co-sell motion that puts a partner's sellers in front of our buyers, and ours in front of theirs. The acquisition thesis that says this supply is too strategic to rent. You will identify those opportunities, structure them, and drive them to signature.

You are equally comfortable interrogating an evaluation result and negotiating a term sheet — you design the proof that tells us whether a partner's data is actually net-new, build the business case, and run the commercial conversation to close. Success here is not deals signed. It is data availability delivered and value created: measurable improvements in coverage and quality that customers feel, revenue from partnerships that earn it, and a cost per record that gets better every year.

What You'll Do (Essential Functions)

• Own the multi-year data supply and partnership strategy - maintain a live view of the global data market by domain and geography. Know who is emerging, who is consolidating, and where our next structural advantage comes from. Bring a point of view, not a vendor list.
• Make the build-buy-partner-acquire call - decide when ZoomInfo should license a source, co-develop it, structure an exclusive, build the capability internally, or pursue it as an acquisition. Defend that recommendation to executive leadership.
• Build and run co-sell and joint GTM motions with strategic partners, in partnership with Sales, Product Marketing, and Alliances - from the commercial construct through enablement and pipeline accountability.
• Source and shape acquisition opportunities - identify suppliers where owning the asset beats renting it, develop the thesis, and partner with Corporate Development through diligence and integration planning.
• Own the supplier portfolio end-to-end and its economics - sourcing, evaluation, onboarding, renewal, and rationalization; total portfolio cost, cost per usable record, and consolidation targets. Kill or renegotiate what is not earning its place.
• Design and run rigorous evaluations — define the test, measure net-new lift and accuracy against our own corpus, and produce a recommendation with numbers behind it. A partner's coverage claims are a hypothesis, not evidence.
• Represent ZoomInfo to partner executives - build the senior relationships that make us the first call when a partner has something worth bringing.
• Move deals through Legal, Privacy, Security, and Procurement without losing momentum, and ensure every source we ingest is compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and regional data protection requirements.
• Own the outcome after signature - partner with product and data teams through ingestion, matching, and publishing; keep the portfolio's single source of truth current; measure each partnership's impact and retire the ones that can't show it.

What You Bring

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years in data partnerships, strategic partnerships, business development, or data acquisition, with direct ownership of external relationships and their commercial outcomes
• Proven track record negotiating and closing third-party data agreements, including non-standard constructs — revenue share, reciprocal exchange, co-development, exclusivity, or joint go-to-market
• Demonstrated strategic judgment — has built a supply or partnership strategy for a category, not just executed against a requirements list
• Hands-on analytical ability — can independently interrogate an evaluation result, challenge a methodology, and tell the difference between a real coverage gain and a well-presented one
• Deep understanding of B2B data domains - firmographics, contact, identity, intent, technographics - how quality is measured (coverage, accuracy, freshness, match rate), and experience designing and defending structured evaluations
• Working fluency with data privacy frameworks (GDPR, CCPA) and how they constrain data sourcing, usage, and redistribution
• Commercial ownership - has carried a spend envelope or partnership P&L and made hard consolidation or termination calls
• Executive presence and cross-functional leadership - credible with a CDO or CFO audience and with partner executives; drives outcomes across product, engineering, sales, legal, and procurement without formal authority; writes a business case an executive will sign and a finding an engineer will trust

Preferred Qualifications

• Background in business development, corporate strategy, or M&A - including sourcing, diligence, or integration of a data asset
• Has run a co-sell or alliance motion with revenue accountability, not just a partnership agreement
• Experience acquiring global data - regional suppliers, public business registries, non-US contact and company sources - and the compliance nuances that come with them
• Familiarity with multi-source enrichment economics (waterfalls, per-match pricing) and the identity data ecosystem
• Has built a partnership or vendor management operating system, not just inherited one

Who Thrives Here

You think in multi-year positions, not in deals. You can hold two things at once - the strategic case for why a partnership matters to where we're going, and the hard-nosed read on whether the data is actually any good. When a partner tells you they have 40 million records you don't yet have, your instinct is to design the test that proves or disproves it, not to build a slide about it.

You are comfortable telling a partner no, comfortable telling your own leadership that a deal we already signed isn't working, and just as comfortable walking into a partner's executive team and proposing something neither company has done before. You would rather run one partnership all the way to measurable impact than manage twenty relationships that produce meetings.

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