Partnership Manager – Merchant Partnerships & Loyalty

Please apply only if you are open to relocating and working onsite in Doha, Qatar for the duration of an 18-month engagement. Candidates already in Qatar with a valid work permit are encouraged to apply.

We are hiring a Partnership Manager to work on a project for one of our clients, a leading regional bank. This role sits inside the bank's loyalty and cards function and is about one thing: growing the merchant ecosystem behind a card portfolio and turning that into offers cardholders actually use. It is a commercial, relationship-driven role for someone who has personally built and run merchant partnerships in a cards, payments, or fintech setting.

You will own the merchant partnership lifecycle end to end, from finding and onboarding partners through to negotiating offers and keeping those relationships productive over time. The work has direct, visible impact on cardholder engagement, portfolio spend, and revenue.

We are looking for someone with 5 to 8 years in partnership management, merchant acquisition, or loyalty programme management, with a track record they can point to.

The work itself

Winning and onboarding merchants is the heart of the role. You will source, evaluate, and bring on new merchant partners across retail, dining, travel, e-commerce, and lifestyle, making sure each one fits the card portfolio's strategy and the customers it is trying to reach.

Once partners are on board, you keep them. You will be their main point of contact, running regular business reviews, heading off problems before they escalate, and spotting opportunities to deepen the relationship and grow value on both sides.

A big part of the mandate is designing and negotiating offers. You will build and optimise merchant-funded offers, cashback structures, and loyalty rewards, then negotiate the commercial terms behind them — revenue-share, exclusivity, co-funding — while keeping everything inside the relevant regulatory and card-scheme rules.

You will also keep an eye on the market, tracking competitor loyalty programmes, emerging merchant categories, and consumer trends across Qatar and the wider region, and feeding that into a prioritised partnership pipeline.

Throughout, you will measure what is working. You will track partnership and offer performance against clear targets and turn that into recommendations that sharpen strategy and improve return, working closely with product, marketing, digital, CRM, risk, and compliance teams to get offers live and landing.

What you need to have

Mandatory:

• 5 to 8 years in partnership management, merchant acquisition, or loyalty programme management within banking, cards and payments, or fintech
• A proven track record sourcing, negotiating, and managing commercial merchant partnerships end to end
• Strong commercial and analytical judgement — able to read performance data, spot what it's telling you, and turn it into partnership decisions
• Professional English fluency, for both internal and external stakeholder communication
• Available immediately or on a short notice period

Preferred:

• A working understanding of interchange economics, card-scheme rules, and how merchant-funded offers actually work
• Hands-on experience with loyalty programme models — points, cashback, merchant-funded, coalition
• Experience with CRM platforms (Salesforce, Hub Spot, or equivalent) for pipeline and relationship tracking
• Familiarity with loyalty management and campaign/offer-publishing platforms
• Comfort with analytics and reporting tools (advanced Excel, Tableau, Power BI, or equivalent)
• Arabic language ability, which widens merchant reach in the region
• A relevant degree; an MBA or a loyalty-marketing certification is a plus
• Exposure to test-and-learn or A/B methodologies for offer optimisation

The kind of person we want

You should be genuinely commercial — comfortable in a negotiation, able to structure a deal that works for both the bank and the merchant, and able to hold senior relationships on both sides. You should understand the cards and loyalty world well enough to know why interchange, scheme rules, and offer mechanics shape what's possible. And you should be able to juggle a lot of partners and competing priorities at once without letting relationships go cold or offers slip.

What success looks like

• A steady flow of new merchant partners brought on and activated
• Cardholders actively engaging with and redeeming the offers you've built
• Measurable lift in card spend traceable to merchant-driven offers
• Partners renewing at the end of their terms rather than churning
• A shrinking gap between signing a partner and getting their offer live

To apply

To apply, share your updated CV along with a short note on the merchant partnerships you've personally sourced and negotiated, and the loyalty or offer programmes you've run.