Technical Alliances Lead

Technical Alliances Lead

Operant AI | Full-Time | Hybrid Set-up in the SF Bay Area

About Operant AI

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.

The Role

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.

What You'll Do

• Partnership 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 For

• Experience

• • 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.

• Operant AI is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to building an inclusive environment for all employees.