Senior Partnerships Manager

Runware•San Francisco, CA

6d•Remote

About The Position

Runware is seeking a Senior Partnerships Manager to lead and expand 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 successful candidate will be the primary point of contact for model-provider partnerships, collaborating 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 requiring exceptional negotiation skills, the ability to build trust and strong relationships, and a capacity for rapid learning in the dynamic AI market. The ideal candidate will excel at fostering external relationships, negotiating effectively, and translating model-provider capabilities into internal product decisions, customer value, and improved economic efficiency.

Requirements

7+ years of experience in strategic partnerships, business development, partner management, commercial strategy, enterprise sales, vendor management, or a related field.
Strong track record of negotiating complex commercial agreements with strategic partners, vendors, platforms, infrastructure providers, SaaS companies, cloud providers, API companies, or technology ecosystems.
Excellent commercial judgment, with the ability to evaluate pricing, usage commitments, deal structures, margin impact, and long-term strategic value.
Proven ability to collaborate 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 diverse audiences.
High degree of ownership, strong follow-through, structured execution, and comfort operating in a fast-paced, 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, including 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, creators, open-source communities, audio and 3D model providers, and inference infrastructure partners. Maintain end-to-end commercial relationship management and ensure strong visibility into partner roadmaps, launches, pricing, capabilities, and strategic opportunities.
Negotiate best-in-market commercial terms, including pricing, volume commitments, credits, preferred access, support levels, SLAs, roadmap visibility, co-marketing, launch support, enterprise terms, and non-standard strategic deal structures.
Identify and execute opportunities to enhance product capabilities, reduce costs, improve margins, accelerate model launches, elevate customer experience, or differentiate Runware in the market.
Act as a liaison between model providers and internal teams (Product, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Finance, Legal, leadership), coordinating product evaluation, integration handoffs, customer messaging, sales enablement, financial modeling, and legal/commercial reviews.
Track and analyze AI market intelligence, including new model releases, benchmark shifts, pricing changes, context-window improvements, multimodal capabilities, latency and reliability trade-offs, enterprise terms, ecosystem movements, and competitor access. Translate this information into clear internal updates and recommendations.
Drive partner-led launches from a commercial perspective, coordinating timing with model creators, securing preferred or exclusive access, aligning launch narratives with Marketing and Sales, partnering with Product and Engineering on integration, and ensuring launches contribute to measurable pipeline impact.
Support Go-To-Market (GTM) and customer communication efforts 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.
Establish 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.