Global Account Director, Payment Partnerships - WooCommerce

Global Account Director, Payment Partnerships - WooCommerce

Automattic, the global leader in publishing, messaging, and commerce software, is building the operating system for the open web. Our goal is to democratize publishing, messaging, and commerce so anyone with a story can tell it, and anyone with a product can sell it, regardless of income, gender, politics, language, or where they live in the world. With a strong commitment to open source, we have deep roots in WordPress, the platform that powers our business and 43% of the web.

In a fast-paced, complex market, we own a diverse set of assets, deploy numerous business models, and offer scalability from B2C to SMB and Enterprise customers. Our brands include ecommerce and fintech (WooCommerce), Enterprise SaaS (WordPress VIP), and infrastructure hosting, spanning customer segments that include SMB, online merchants, enterprise, government, and even consumer. In our incubator, we also support a broad set of new business start-ups that currently incorporate messaging, ads, and social media.

The co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, Matt Mullenweg, is driving a growth and expansion strategy that is still in its early days, with a massive addressable market and exceptional upside. Today, we manage the internet properties for renowned organizations such as Salesforce, Porsche, Meta, Disney, and NASA. Over four million online stores run on WooCommerce, which accounts for 34% of all online stores globally, and more than 1 billion people use our products each month. Automattic has established itself as a pivotal player in the digital landscape.

We’re a remote-based company with 1500 Automatticians in nearly every corner of the globe, speaking over a hundred different languages. Unlike many companies, we are and will always be 100% remote (we call it distributed). This means that you can work from anywhere in the world, in any time zone, leveraging collaboration tools and asynchronous communication.

Automattic’s story would not be complete without mentioning our focus on mergers and acquisitions. Over the past 17 years, we’ve acquired 35 companies, including WooCommerce, Parse.ly, and most recently, Texts.com and Beeper.com, our multi-channel messaging plays. These acquisitions now represent some of Automattic’s largest business units and growth drivers.

Our company is backed by some of the world’s most respected investors, spanning mutual funds, venture capital, sovereign wealth, and strategics. These include Salesforce Ventures, Insight Venture Partners, ICONIQ Capital, True Ventures, Wellington Management, Alta Park Capital, Schonfeld, New York Times Company, and Tiger Global Management.

Our Board includes Sue Decker, who also serves on the boards of Berkshire Hathaway, Costco, and Vox Media, and Ann Dunwoody, the first female four-star general in the US Army, who also serves as a Trustee for Fidelity Investments. Automattic is profitable, generates positive cash flow, and aggressively invests in future growth. It’s a great place to build a career, learn, and contribute!

Global Account Director, Payment Partnerships

The Global Account Director, Payments Partnerships, is a senior commercial leader accountable for one of WooCommerce's most strategically significant partner relationships: a $100M ARR partnership with a mandate to deliver 30% year-over-year growth. This is a high-visibility, high-ownership role that operates at the intersection of executive relationship management, commercial strategy, and cross-functional execution. The right candidate is equally comfortable in a C-suite boardroom and a technical working session. They bring deep fluency in payment economics and the global acquiring landscape, with a proven track record of scaling large, complex global partnerships

About the Role

You will own the full strategic and commercial lifecycle of this partnership, from multi-year joint business planning to day-to-day execution. As the primary relationship owner across all levels of the partner organization, you’ll build trusted connections from C-suite executives to individual contributors. Internally, you will act as the champion, orchestrator, and accountable owner—aligning engineering, product, marketing, legal, and finance behind a shared partner growth agenda, and securing the investment and resources needed to execute against it. You will also maintain a clear view of the broader global payments and ecommerce landscape, using that intelligence to identify capability gaps, surface new opportunities, and continuously strengthen the strategic rationale for the partnership.

What You Will Do

Partnership Ownership & Revenue Growth

• Own and grow a $100M ARR strategic partnership, delivering a minimum of 30% year-over-year growth through disciplined pipeline development, commercial expansion, and joint go-to-market execution.
• Develop, maintain, and execute a rolling multi-year strategic partnership plan that aligns WooCommerce's roadmap and capabilities with the partner's commercial objectives and market position.
• Identify, scope, and close expansion opportunities—including new geographies, product lines, merchant segments, and revenue-share structures—that unlock mutual value.
• Define and track the commercial KPIs, milestones, and leading indicators that reflect the health and trajectory of the partnership.

Executive & Stakeholder Relationship Management

• Build and sustain deep, trusted relationships across all levels of the partner organization, from C-suite and VP-level sponsors to operational and technical teams, ensuring alignment, advocacy, and momentum at every tier.
• Serve as the primary executive point of contact for the partner, driving QBRs, annual planning sessions, and escalation resolution with authority and credibility.
• Internally, act as the single accountable owner for the partnership, managing a broad set of stakeholders across product, engineering, marketing, legal, finance, and operations to secure alignment, investment, and execution commitment.
• Proactively manage partner satisfaction, anticipate friction points, and resolve issues before they become relationship risks.

Strategic Planning & Multi-Year Execution

• Lead the development and ongoing refinement of a comprehensive multi-year joint business plan, including growth targets, investment requirements, capability milestones, and market expansion priorities.
• Build and present compelling business cases to senior WooCommerce leadership to secure the resources, budget, and organizational commitment required to execute on the partnership strategy.
• Translate high-level strategic goals into phased, actionable execution plans, balancing ambition with operational realism, and managing progress rigorously.
• Drive accountability across internal teams through clear ownership assignment, milestone tracking, and regular executive reporting.
• Implement structured frameworks for ongoing partner evaluation using competitive analysis, industry benchmarks, and financial modeling—ensuring the partnership remains best-in-class relative to market alternatives.

Global Payments Landscape & Capability Intelligence

• Maintain a deep, current understanding of the global payments ecosystem—including acquiring, PSPs, alternative payment methods, payment network rules, interchange economics, and bank transfer cost structures—and apply that knowledge to sharpen partnership strategy and commercial positioning.
• Actively monitor the market for emerging payment technologies, capabilities, and competitive dynamics that could enhance WooCommerce’s merchant value proposition, reduce underlying costs, or create new revenue opportunities through this partnership.
• Use technical fluency in payment capabilities to assess integration feasibility, validate business cases, and ensure that commercial terms are grounded in a clear understanding of product and operational realities.
• Translate payment capability gaps and merchant needs into concrete partnership priorities, working closely with product and engineering to align partner roadmap commitments with WooCommerce’s strategic direction.

Global Growth & Go-to-Market

• Drive global partnership growth by identifying and activating opportunities across geographies, adapting strategy to local market dynamics while maintaining a coherent global framework.
• Collaborate with marketing, product, and sales teams to develop and execute joint go-to-market initiatives, including co-selling, co-marketing, merchant acquisition programs, and partner-led revenue acceleration.
• Represent WooCommerce's strategic interests in commercial negotiations, contract renewals, and partnership expansions, crafting creative commercial structures that optimize for both strategic flexibility and economic outcomes.

Operational Excellence

• Establish and maintain robust reporting mechanisms to track partnership performance, commercial outcomes, and strategic milestones—delivering consistent, data-driven updates to senior leadership.
• Build scalable processes and frameworks that enable efficient collaboration between WooCommerce and the partner across geographies and functions.
• Manage contract amendments, commercial reviews, and renegotiations with rigor and commercial discipline.
• Thrive in ambiguity: able to define structure, process, and direction in fast-moving, resource-constrained environments where the path forward is unclear.

What You Bring

• 10+ years of experience in strategic partnerships, global account management, or commercial leadership within the payments industry, ideally spanning merchant services, acquiring, or payment service providers.
• Demonstrated track record of growing strategic partnerships at significant scale ($50M+ ARR), consistently delivering against aggressive revenue growth targets.
• Deep knowledge of payment economics, including interchange structures, bank transfer costs, payment network rules, and the pricing and cost dynamics that drive partner and merchant outcomes.
• Strong technical fluency in payment capabilities: able to assess integration feasibility, translate technical concepts into commercial terms, and engage credibly with product and engineering counterparts.
• Exceptional executive presence and written and verbal communication skills, with a proven ability to build trust and influence at the C-suite level, both with partners and internally.
• Strong analytical and financial modeling capabilities, with experience building business cases, applying competitive analysis, and presenting ROI frameworks to executive audiences.
• Proven ability to operate as an internal orchestrator, mobilizing and aligning cross-functional teams (product, engineering, legal, finance, marketing) without direct authority.
• Experience managing multi-year joint business plans and translating long-range strategy into structured, accountable execution.
• Comfort operating in globally distributed, remote-first, and asynchronous environments across multiple time zones and cultures.
• Experience managing global partnerships across multiple geographies is strongly preferred.

Salary range: $105,000 – $215,000 USD.  Please note that salary ranges are global, regardless of location, and we pay in local currency. We're only consideirng US based candidates for this role. 

We are searching for high-caliber candidates with the skills and qualities to have a net positive for Automattic. Pay will reflect the potential contribution and the impact you can bring, which may, in some cases, go beyond the range stated.

This isn’t your typical work-from-home job—we are a fully-remote company with an open vacation policy. Read more about our compensation philosophy. To see a full list of benefits by country, consult our Benefits Page. And check out these links to learn more about How We Hire and What We Expect from Ourselves.