Senior Partnerships Manager

Runware•San Francisco, CA

4d•Remote

About The Position

Runware is seeking a Senior Partnerships Manager to lead and expand its strategic relationships with top AI model providers. This role is crucial for securing favorable commercial terms, gaining roadmap visibility, ensuring product access, gathering market insights, and maximizing strategic value from the model-provider ecosystem. The individual will be the primary point of contact for model-provider partnerships and will collaborate closely with Product, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Finance, and Legal teams to translate external AI partnerships into tangible business outcomes. This is a senior, cross-functional commercial position ideal for a skilled negotiator, a relationship builder, and a quick learner in the dynamic AI market. The successful candidate will excel at building strong external relationships, negotiating effectively, and translating model-provider capabilities into internal product decisions, customer value, and improved economics.

Requirements

7+ years of experience in strategic partnerships, business development, partner management, commercial strategy, enterprise sales, vendor management, or a related role.
Strong track record negotiating complex commercial agreements with strategic partners, vendors, platforms, infrastructure providers, SaaS companies, cloud providers, API companies, or technology ecosystems.
Excellent commercial judgment, including the ability to evaluate pricing, usage commitments, deal structures, margin impact, and long-term strategic value.
Proven ability to work cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Finance, Legal, and executive stakeholders.
Strong communication skills, with the ability to simplify complex technical and commercial information for different audiences.
High ownership, strong follow-through, structured execution, and comfort operating in a fast-moving, ambiguous market.

Nice To Haves

Experience in AI, machine learning, cloud infrastructure, developer platforms, API businesses, SaaS, data infrastructure, or enterprise software.
Understanding of the AI model ecosystem: frontier labs, open-source models, inference providers, multimodal models, model pricing, latency, context windows, enterprise deployment needs, and AI application architecture.
Technical fluency sufficient to discuss model performance, API capabilities, inference requirements, context windows, multimodality, fine-tuning, evaluation, latency, reliability, and model launches.
Prior experience negotiating with large technology vendors, cloud providers, platform partners, or strategic ecosystem partners.
Experience building partner programs, partner operating cadences, QBRs, partner scorecards, or executive-level relationship maps.

Responsibilities

Own and negotiate strategic model-provider relationships, managing and deepening connections with leading generative media model providers across frontier labs, generative media model creators, open-source communities, audio and 3D model providers, and inference infrastructure partners.
Maintain strong visibility into partner roadmaps, launches, pricing changes, model capabilities, and strategic opportunities.
Lead negotiations on pricing, volume commitments, credits, preferred access, support levels, SLAs, roadmap visibility, co-marketing, launch support, enterprise terms, and non-standard strategic deal structures to secure best-in-market commercial terms.
Identify and execute opportunities to enhance product capabilities, reduce costs, improve margins, accelerate model launches, improve customer experience, or differentiate Runware in the market.
Act as the central liaison between model providers and internal teams including Product, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Finance, Legal, and leadership, coordinating product evaluation, integration handoffs, customer messaging, sales enablement, finance modeling, and legal/commercial review.
Track new model releases, benchmark shifts, pricing changes, context-window improvements, multimodal capabilities, latency and reliability tradeoffs, enterprise terms, ecosystem moves, and competitor access, converting this information into clear internal updates and recommendations.
Coordinate partner-led launches on the commercial side, including timing with model creators, securing preferred or exclusive access, aligning launch narratives, partnering on integration builds, and ensuring launches translate into measurable pipeline impact.
Support Go-To-Market (GTM) and customer communication by helping Sales and Marketing translate model-provider updates into customer-facing value, launch narratives, partner comparison notes, competitive positioning, sales enablement, and customer-ready messaging.
Build and maintain a scalable partnership operating rhythm, including partner account plans, executive relationship maps, Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs), negotiation trackers, pricing and terms databases, launch calendars, model-update summaries, escalation paths, and partnership performance reporting.