Technical Alliances LeadOperant AI | Full-Time | Hybrid Set-up in the SF Bay AreaThe RoleWe'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.
What You'll DoPartnership 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
What We're Looking ForExperience- 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 structure joint business plans, negotiate partnership terms, and align incentives across organizations
- Highly collaborative - skilled at influencing without authority across internal engineering, product, marketing, and sales teams
- Excellent written and verbal communication; able to distill complex technical and business concepts for any audience
Why This Role- Own a greenfield: You'll shape how Operant AI builds its partner ecosystem from the ground up, with room to define the playbook
- Work with the best: Cerebras, Nutanix, and Tenstorrent are building the compute infrastructure that will power the next decade of AI - you'll be at that table
- Real technical weight: This isn't a badge-collecting alliance role - you'll drive integration strategy and have the technical credibility to back it up
- Mission that matters: AI security and observability is one of the most important unsolved problems in enterprise AI. Operant AI is solving it.
