Technical Alliances Lead

Operant AI•San Francisco, CA

22h•Hybrid

About The Position

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. 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.

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
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
Comfort reading and discussing technical documentation, architecture diagrams, and integration specs
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

Nice To Haves

Experience with enterprise security, observability, or runtime platforms is a significant plus

Responsibilities

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
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
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
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