Technical Alliances Lead at Operant AI

<h1><strong>Technical Alliances Lead</strong></h1> <p><strong>Operant AI | Full-Time | Hybrid Set-up in the SF Bay Area</strong></p> <h2><strong>About Operant AI</strong></h2> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <h2><strong>The Role</strong></h2> <p>We're looking for a <strong>Director of Technical Alliances</strong> to own and scale our strategic partnerships with leading AI infrastructure providers — including <strong>Cerebras, Nutanix, Tenstorrent</strong>, 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.</p> <p>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.</p> <h2><strong>What You'll Do</strong></h2> <p><strong>Partnership Strategy &amp; Executive Engagement</strong></p> <ul> <li>Own the end-to-end relationship with key AI infrastructure partners, including executive alignment, business planning, and QBRs</li> <li>Develop and execute joint go-to-market strategies that drive measurable pipeline and revenue for both Operant AI and our partners</li> <li>Establish Operant AI as the preferred security and observability partner across AI compute and cloud infrastructure ecosystems</li> <li>Identify and prioritize new strategic alliance opportunities as the AI infrastructure landscape evolves</li> </ul> <p><strong>Technical Leadership &amp; Integration Oversight</strong></p> <ul> <li>Define the technical integration vision and roadmap for each partner relationship, working closely with Operant AI's engineering and product teams</li> <li>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</li> <li>Oversee the end-to-end execution of joint integrations from architecture through production readiness, ensuring quality, reliability, and mutual value</li> <li>Translate complex technical requirements between partner engineering teams and Operant AI's internal stakeholders</li> </ul> <p><strong>Joint Customer &amp; Revenue Development</strong></p> <ul> <li>Drive co-sell and co-solution motions with partner field and sales teams to source and close shared customer opportunities</li> <li>Act as a trusted technical advisor to joint customers evaluating or deploying Operant AI on partner infrastructure</li> <li>Build joint solution briefs, reference architectures, and enablement materials that equip partner teams to position Operant AI effectively</li> <li>Track and report on partner-influenced pipeline, integration adoption, and customer outcomes</li> </ul> <p><strong>Ecosystem Building</strong></p> <ul> <li>Represent Operant AI at partner events, technical summits, and industry conferences</li> <li>Champion partner needs internally — providing feedback loops to product and engineering that shape Operant AI's roadmap</li> <li>Build and maintain strong relationships across partner organizations at the technical, field, and executive levels</li> </ul> <h2><strong>What We're Looking For</strong></h2> <p><strong>Experience</strong></p> <ul> <li>8+ years in technical alliances, partner engineering, sales engineering, or a combination thereof — ideally within AI, cloud infrastructure, or enterprise software</li> <li>Demonstrated experience managing strategic technology partnerships with hardware or infrastructure providers (AI accelerators, cloud platforms, hyperconverged infrastructure, or similar)</li> <li>Track record of driving partner-sourced or partner-influenced revenue and building scalable co-sell motions</li> <li>Experience working with or alongside AI infrastructure platforms (e.g., AI compute, inference serving, data center fabric) strongly preferred</li> </ul> <p><strong>Technical Depth</strong></p> <ul> <li>Strong working knowledge of AI/ML infrastructure — including inference hardware, distributed compute, containerized workloads, and Kubernetes-based orchestration</li> <li>Ability to engage credibly with partner engineering teams on integration design, API architecture, and security considerations</li> <li>Experience with enterprise security, observability, or runtime platforms is a significant plus</li> <li>Comfort reading and discussing technical documentation, architecture diagrams, and integration specs</li> </ul> <p><strong>Business &amp; Leadership Skills</strong></p> <ul> <li>Exceptional executive presence — able to build trust and drive alignment with C-suite and VP-level contacts at partner organizations</li> <li>Strong commercial instincts with the ability to structure joint business plans, negotiate partnership terms, and align incentives across organizations</li> <li>Highly collaborative — skilled at influencing without authority across internal engineering, product, marketing, and sales teams</li> <li>Excellent written and verbal communication; able to distill complex technical and business concepts for any audience</li> </ul> <h2><strong>Why This Role</strong></h2> <ul> <li><strong>Own a greenfield</strong>: You'll shape how Operant AI builds its partner ecosystem from the ground up, with room to define the playbook</li> <li><strong>Work with the best</strong>: Cerebras, Nutanix, and Tenstorrent are building the compute infrastructure that will power the next decade of AI — you'll be at that table</li> <li><strong>Real technical weight</strong>: This isn't a badge-collecting alliance role — you'll drive integration strategy and have the technical credibility to back it up</li> <li><strong>Mission that matters</strong>: AI security and observability is one of the most important unsolved problems in enterprise AI. Operant AI is solving it.</li> </ul> <p><em>Operant AI is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to building an inclusive environment for all employees.</em></p> <p>&nbsp;</p>