The org chart is not a formality. It is the constraint you will live inside.
Reporting into sales
You will be asked for pipeline. That is honest. The risk is that every week becomes co-sell theatre and the integration never gets a sprint. You need a written engineering window, or you become a second SDR with nicer slides.
Reporting into product
You will be asked for a roadmap. That is also honest. The risk is that you become an integration PM who never talks to a partner seller. The commercial motion dies. You need a named sales owner who will actually attach the pairing to deals.
Reporting into the CEO or founder
Common in the first hire. Good: you can say no to vanity logos. Bad: you inherit every conference intro the CEO made on a plane. Put the matrix in front of them in month one. If they will not kill a logo, you do not have a partnerships seat. You have a hospitality seat.
The questions that reveal the truth
Who owns the integration backlog. How many engineering weeks exist this quarter for partners. What happened to the last partnership that died. Whether you will have a CRM field for partner influence. If they cannot answer, the seat is undefined. Undefined seats burn people.
What “success” will be
Ask them to finish this sentence: “In two quarters we will know this hire worked because ___.” If the blank is “more logos on the website,” walk. If it is “two live integrations with named adoption,” you can work with that.
You can do the job from any of the three lines. You cannot do it from a line that will not give you a no, a scope, and a number.