About the Role
As the Sr. Partnerships Manager for US Model Labs, you will own Together AI's relationships with the most influential model builders in the United States: frontier labs, the AI research organizations inside the hyperscalers and major platform companies, chipmakers with their own model programs, and the well-funded independent labs shaping the open-weights landscape. These are the partners whose releases move the market, and your job is to make sure Together AI is the platform they launch on, build with, and route developers to.
This is a portfolio of a small number of very large, very complex accounts. Unlike a broad ecosystem role, success here is measured in depth rather than breadth: multi-threaded relationships across research, product, legal, and business teams; deals that often bundle model distribution with compute, co-marketing, and joint go-to-market; and the trust required to get early access to models before they ship. You will sit at the intersection of Product, Engineering, Finance, and Marketing, and you will frequently be the person in the room representing Together AI to organizations many times our size.
You are a strategic deal-maker who is comfortable in long, ambiguous cycles with sophisticated counterparties, and who can turn a single relationship into a durable, expanding partnership.
Responsibilities
- Own the US lab portfolio: Build and execute the partnership strategy for a defined set of major US model labs, including account plans, executive engagement, and a clear view of each lab's roadmap and where Together AI fits in it.
- Land flagship launches: Secure day-zero (or day-one) availability of the most anticipated model releases on the Together platform, coordinating pre-release access, technical bring-up, legal, and launch marketing so we ship alongside the lab.
- Multi-thread across large organizations: Navigate research teams, product leads, developer relations, alliances and partner programs, legal, and executive sponsors to build support for Together AI at every level of the partner org.
- Structure strategic deals: Lead negotiation of distribution, licensing, revenue-share, compute, and co-marketing agreements, including non-standard structures that combine several of these. Handle complex IP, usage-rights, and exclusivity discussions with counterparties that have deep in-house legal and BD teams.
- Product and engineering alignment: Work with Product and Engineering to define bring-up requirements, manage NDA'd early access, and ensure new models are optimized for our inference and fine-tuning stacks ahead of launch.
- Commercial strategy: Partner with Finance to build deal structures that balance aggressive growth with sustainable unit economics, and to model the revenue impact of flagship model availability.
- Go-to-market and co-selling: Collaborate with Partner Marketing on joint announcements and campaigns, and work with Sales to turn lab relationships into enterprise wins through co-selling motions, joint customer engagements, and partner referral programs.
- Be the voice of the labs internally: Bring market and roadmap intelligence back to Product and Leadership, and shape how Together AI positions itself relative to the labs' own platforms and their cloud partners.
Requirements
- Enterprise-scale partnership experience: 7–10+ years in Strategic Partnerships, Business Development, or Alliances, with a track record of closing and growing partnerships with large technology companies where the counterparty had its own BD, legal, and partner teams.
- Strategic deal-maker: You have constructed complex, multi-component agreements that don't follow a standard template, and you can hold your own in IP, licensing, revenue-share, and exclusivity negotiations with sophisticated counterparties.
- High EQ and executive presence: You build trust quickly, manage long relationships through changes in personnel and priorities, and are credible in front of senior leaders at partner organizations.
- Technical fluency: While you don't need to be an ML researcher, you should be able to discuss model architectures, context windows, licensing terms, and inference and fine-tuning requirements with both partners and our internal teams.
- AI-native mindset: You work at pace with a relentless sense of urgency, and you prefer "done and iterating" over "perfect and stagnant," even while managing accounts that move on their own timelines.
Bonus Points
- Direct experience working at, or partnering with, a frontier lab, a hyperscaler AI organization, or a major open-weights model builder.
- Experience with hyperscaler or cloud marketplace partner programs (e.g., alliances, co-sell, or ISV programs).
- Experience in co-selling motions where partnerships directly drove revenue.
- Background at a high-growth API, cloud infrastructure, or developer platform company managing complex ecosystems.
About Together AI
Together AI, the AI Native Cloud, is purpose-built for AI engineers. AI application developers get high-performance inference that scales reliably, fine-tuning and reinforcement learning for creating frontier-level specialized models, and pre-training at massive scale for fully custom intelligence, all around a marketplace of leading open models that teams can run, adapt, and own. Trusted by Cursor, Decagon, ElevenLabs, Salesforce, and Zoom, Together serves 400+ trillion tokens a month.
Compensation
We offer competitive compensation, startup equity, health insurance and other competitive benefits. The US base salary range for this full-time position is: $ 300 - 350K OTE + equity + benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by location, level and role. Individual compensation will be determined by experience, skills, and job-related knowledge.
Equal Opportunity
Together AI is an Equal Opportunity Employer and is proud to offer equal employment opportunity to everyone regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, veteran status, and more.
Please see our privacy policy at https://www.together.ai/privacy.