Director, Programs & Partnerships

About the company

Primary is the largest early stage venture firm in the world, with $1 billion in assets under management and a staff of 50 working alongside founders to build unicorns like Alloy, Chief, Electric, K Health, Slice, Vestwell, and many more.

The firm takes a low-volume, high-conviction approach—and devotes unreasonable resources toward making sure founders can succeed. With an Impact team that outnumbers investors 2:1, operational experts spend 100% of their time making hires, signing customers, and enabling future fundraising to supercharge growth. This partnership with top-tier founders makes companies in Primary’s portfolio 2x more likely to raise a Series A and 19x more likely to reach a billion-dollar-plus valuation—a third of Fund I companies are unicorns, less than a decade out.

About the role

Primary's programming is only as good as the people in the room, the partners behind it, and the systems that make it run. This role owns all three: who we convene, who we bring along as partners, and how the operational infrastructure holds it together. It sits at the intersection of relationship management, production discipline, and network curation. You'll build the programs that manage our relationships with our sponsors, vendors, and partners, and build the operational systems that keep everything running cleanly in between.

• Summit Event production. You'll own end-to-end production of Primary's annual Summit That means timeline ownership, vendor management, run-of-show, day-of decisions, and post-event wrap. You won't start from zero: there are established vendor relationships and playbooks. But you'll be the one driving it.

• Intimate programming. You’ll run 25 - 30 curated dinners, roundtables, and small convenings per year. You'll design and execute them with the same rigor you'd bring to a large event, and you'll understand that the guest list is the product.

• Sponsor relationships. You'll manage our sponsor and partner relationships day-to-day — deliverable tracking, check-ins, issue resolution, and the ongoing communication that turns a one-year sponsor into a multi-year partner.

• Vendor and partner management. You'll own our key vendor relationships: AV, venue, catering, production, print. That means negotiating, holding accountability, maintaining the relationships that give us leverage over time, and knowing when to bring in a new vendor vs. when to deepen an existing one.

• CRM and network operations. Getting the right people in the right room. You'll own the operational layer: data hygiene, contact organization, pipeline tracking. Making guest lists, tracking conversions, building relationships with guests, and understanding how every relationship ladders up into Primary's broader strategy.

• Budget and resource tracking. You'll track spend across programming, think proactively about optimizations and establish new formats for covering costs.

About you

You've probably never had a job title that fully captured what you do. You figure out how to make things work (the programming, the partners, the moving pieces) wherever you've been. You've been close to big, high-stakes programs. You've sat across from a sponsor who had a problem and handled it. You've built a process that someone else inherited and actually used. You're not looking for a role where you execute someone else's plan. You want to shape, own, and constantly improve, while bringing real experiences and relationships to life.

Core qualifications: 6+ years of experience across event production, experiential, partnerships, or program management. Specific industry background matters less than demonstrated range across scale, format, and relationship ownership.

Here's what the role actually requires and how we think about experience:

• AI Fluency. Actively experimenting and building your process around new tools, you've already integrated them into how you plan, produce, and operate, and you have examples of what that looks like in practice.

• You've managed programs at real scale. You don't need to have produced a thousand person summit yourself. But you've been close to that level of complexity, running large-scale activations, multi-day conferences, or high-stakes experiential programs where the logistics were genuinely hard and the stakes were real. You understand what it takes to make something that big actually work, and you've been in the room when things went sideways.

• You know the difference between big and intimate, and you can do both. You've also run small, curated events where the design and curation matter as much as the logistics. You understand that a 25-person dinner requires a totally different instinct than a 1,000-person conference, and you bring that range.

• You've held relationships with sponsors, partners, and vendors- not just managed their logistics. You know when to check in, how to handle questions, and ensure clear and constant communication. You know when to bring in outside support, how to find the right people, and how to hold them to a standard once you do.

• You build systems You've created timelines, trackers, and workflows that other people could follow, that outlasted you, that made the team smarter. You have a framework for things. You're comfortable in tools - whatever combination of project management, CRM, and ops software gets the job done.

• You’re an independent doer. You figure things out. You're proactive about flagging problems before they become crises, and you don't wait to be told what to do.

• You're calm when things get hard. Clear-headed and make decisions under pressure.
  

All candidates must be available to work at least 3 days a week at Primary's office in NYC.