Technical Alliances Lead

About the role

We're looking for a Director of Technical Alliances to own and scale our strategic partnerships with leading AI infrastructure providers - including Cerebras, Nutanix, Tenstorrent , and others we'll build together. This is a senior, high-impact role sitting at the intersection of technical depth and business development, designed for someone who can walk into a partner's engineering team in the morning and present a joint go-to-market strategy to their VP of Partnerships in the afternoon. You'll be the primary relationship owner and technical authority for our most important infrastructure partnerships - driving integration strategy, enabling joint customer success, and building the connective tissue between Operant AI and the ecosystems we depend on and strengthen.

Responsibilities

• Partnership Strategy & Executive Engagement
• Own the end-to-end relationship with key AI infrastructure partners, including executive alignment, business planning, and QBRs
• Develop and execute joint go-to-market strategies that drive measurable pipeline and revenue for both Operant AI and our partners
• Establish Operant AI as the preferred security and observability partner across AI compute and cloud infrastructure ecosystems
• Identify and prioritize new strategic alliance opportunities as the AI infrastructure landscape evolves
• Technical Leadership & Integration Oversight
• Define the technical integration vision and roadmap for each partner relationship, working closely with Operant AI's engineering and product teams
• Serve as a hands-on technical authority in partner conversations - capable of diving deep into AI inference infrastructure, runtime environments, orchestration layers, and security integration points
• Oversee the end-to-end execution of joint integrations from architecture through production readiness, ensuring quality, reliability, and mutual value
• Translate complex technical requirements between partner engineering teams and Operant AI's internal stakeholders
• Joint Customer & Revenue Development
• Drive co-sell and co-solution motions with partner field and sales teams to source and close shared customer opportunities
• Act as a trusted technical advisor to joint customers evaluating or deploying Operant AI on partner infrastructure
• Build joint solution briefs, reference architectures, and enablement materials that equip partner teams to position Operant AI effectively
• Track and report on partner-influenced pipeline, integration adoption, and customer outcomes
• Ecosystem Building
• Represent Operant AI at partner events, technical summits, and industry conferences
• Champion partner needs internally - providing feedback loops to product and engineering that shape Operant AI's roadmap
• Build and maintain strong relationships across partner organizations at the technical, field, and executive levels

Requirements

• 8+ years in technical alliances, partner engineering, sales engineering, or a combination thereof - ideally within AI, cloud infrastructure, or enterprise software
• Demonstrated experience managing strategic technology partnerships with hardware or infrastructure providers (AI accelerators, cloud platforms, hyperconverged infrastructure, or similar)
• Track record of driving partner-sourced or partner-influenced revenue and building scalable co-sell motions
• Experience working with or alongside AI infrastructure platforms (e.g., AI compute, inference serving, data center fabric) strongly preferred
• Technical Depth
• Strong working knowledge of AI/ML infrastructure - including inference hardware, distributed compute, containerized workloads, and Kubernetes-based orchestration
• Ability to engage credibly with partner engineering teams on integration design, API architecture, and security considerations
• Experience with enterprise security, observability, or runtime platforms is a significant plus
• Comfort reading and discussing technical documentation, architecture diagrams, and integration specs
• Business & Leadership Skills
• Exceptional executive presence - able to build trust and drive alignment with C-suite and VP-level contacts at partner organizations
• Strong commercial instincts with the ability to struc

Benefits

Additional Information

Technical Alliances Lead Operant AI | Full-Time | Hybrid Set-up in the SF Bay Area About Operant AI Operant AI is the industry's most comprehensive real-time security platform for AI, Agents, and MCP. Recognized across six Gartner critical AI security reports - including AI TRiSM, MCP Gateways, API Protection, and Securing Custom-Built AI Agents - Operant is the category-defining company protecting the agentic AI era. Our platform delivers real-time discovery, detection, and defense across the full AI stack: LLM APIs, MCP servers and clients, autonomous agents, and the APIs they depend on. Founded by former Apple, VMware, and Google executives and backed by Felicis and SineWave Ventures, we're a fast-moving team on a mission to make AI innovation safe at scale.

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