Director of Technical Alliances

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 build and own a quota-bearing partnerships practice spanning the full technical stack that agentic AI runs on — AI infrastructure and compute providers (Cerebras, Nutanix, Tenstorrent), agent and orchestration platforms (LangChain and similar), major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP), and other categories you identify as the ecosystem evolves. This is a senior, high-impact, revenue-accountable role sitting at the intersection of technical depth and business development: you should be someone who can walk into a partner's engineering team in the morning, co-design an integration at the systems level, and present a joint go-to-market plan with a number attached to their VP of Partnerships in the afternoon.

What You'll Do

Drive revenue with a robust pipeline already in place

• Build and own a pipeline of technical alliances across AI infrastructure, agent/orchestration platforms (e.g., LangChain), cloud providers (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP), and adjacent categories you identify as strategically valuable
• Manage and grow existing partnerships, expanding co-sell and rev share motion with signed partners, working with internal team to produce assets, enablements, and integrations that fuel partner growth, rolling up your sleeves and doing what’s needed to get new business over the finish line
• Report on pipeline, integration adoption, and revenue outcomes for your track with the same rigor as a quota-carrying sales leader

Technical Leadership & Integration Oversight

• Define the technical integration vision for each partner relationship, working closely with Operant AI's engineering and product teams
• Serve as a hands-on technical authority in partner conversations — able to go deep on inference infrastructure and orchestration layers with an infra partner, agent frameworks and MCP-level integration points with a platform like LangChain, and native security tooling and marketplace architecture with a cloud provider
• Oversee joint integrations from architecture through production readiness
• Translate complex technical requirements between partner engineering teams and Operant AI's internal stakeholders

Partnership Strategy & Executive Engagement

• Own relationships with partners across categories, including executive alignment, business planning, and QBRs
• Develop and execute joint go-to-market strategies tailored to each category — infrastructure providers, agent platforms, and hyperscalers each require different motions (including navigating cloud marketplace listings, co-sell programs, and ISV partnership tiers), and you should know the difference
• Establish Operant AI as the preferred AI security and Agentic observability partner across AI compute infrastructure, the agent/orchestration layer, and cloud-native AI services alike
• Continuously scan the AI ecosystem for new categories and partners worth adding to your track

Co-Sell & Revenue Share Programs

• Structure and negotiate co-selling motions and revenue-share agreements with adjacent technology partners, including cloud marketplaces and ISV programs
• Build the operational muscle for co-sell — deal registration, partner-sourced pipeline tracking, and incentive alignment between Operant AI's sales team and partner field teams
• Negotiate commercial terms (referral fees, revenue share splits, marketplace economics) that make joint selling attractive to both sides
• Own the ongoing health of these programs, including resolving channel conflict and keeping incentives aligned as the partnership matures

Joint Customer & Co-Sell Motion

• 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 or platforms
• Build joint solution briefs, reference architectures, and enablement materials suited to each partner category

Ecosystem Building

• Represent Operant AI at partner events, technical summits, and industry conferences across infrastructure, agent-platform, and cloud ecosystems
• Champion partner and market feedback internally, shaping Operant AI's roadmap
• Build and maintain relationships across partner organizations at the technical, field, and executive levels

What We're Looking For

Experience

• 8+ years in technical alliances, partner engineering, or sales engineering, ideally within AI, cloud infrastructure, or enterprise software
• Demonstrated experience owning a quota or revenue target tied to partnerships — not just supporting one
• Experience building a partnerships track from scratch, including deciding which partners and categories to pursue, not just managing an inherited list
• Direct experience structuring co-sell or revenue-share agreements, including cloud marketplace or ISV partner programs (AWS Partner Network, Azure Marketplace, Google Cloud Partner Advantage, or similar)
• Exposure to infrastructure-layer partners (compute, inference, hyperconverged infrastructure), application/platform-layer partners (agent frameworks, orchestration tools), and hyperscaler ecosystems is strongly preferred, given the breadth of this role

Technical Depth

• Strong working knowledge of AI/ML infrastructure — inference hardware, distributed compute, Kubernetes-based orchestration
• Working familiarity with the agent and orchestration ecosystem — frameworks like LangChain, tool-calling patterns, and how MCP fits into agent architectures
• Familiarity with major cloud provider ecosystems — marketplace mechanics, native security/AI services, and partner program structures
• Ability to engage credibly with partner engineering teams on integration design, API architecture, and security considerations, regardless of which layer of the stack the partner sits at
• Experience with enterprise security, observability, or runtime platforms is a significant plus

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, comfortable owning a number, negotiating revenue-share terms, and building the plan to hit it
• 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

• Breadth at the frontier: from AI compute (Cerebras, Nutanix, Tenstorrent) to agent platforms (LangChain and beyond) to the major clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP) — you'll cover the categories defining how agentic AI gets built, run, and bought
• Real technical and commercial weight: this is a quota-bearing seat with the technical credibility to back it up, not a badge-collecting alliance role
• Mission that matters: AI security and observability is one of the most important unsolved problems in enterprise AI. Operant AI is solving it.

Compensation & Benefits

‍Competitive base salary + variable/commission tied to partnership-sourced revenue + equity · Full benefits package

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