Senior AI Partnerships Lead - Remote, Flexible, Equity in London

Runware is the API for all AI. We give developers and product teams a single, unified endpoint to access, run, and scale any AI model — without building or maintaining the infrastructure behind it. The problem we solve is one every product team hits: the AI model landscape is fragmented, fast-moving, and expensive to keep up with. Integrating new models takes engineering time, costs spiral as you scale, and latency kills user experience. Runware abstracts all of that away. Through one API, teams can access hundreds of thousands of AI models across image, video, audio, and beyond — and ship AI-powered features in minutes rather than months.

What makes our API different is what runs underneath it. Our proprietary Sonic Inference Engine® is built on custom hardware and an optimized software stack, delivering up to 10x lower pricing and 30–40% faster inference than traditional cloud deployments. Customers don't pay for idle compute — they pay for what they use, and they get more of it for less.

Founded in 2023 and already powering over 10 billion AI generations for more than 200,000 developers and 300 million end users worldwide, Runware counts Wix, Quora, Freepik, and Together.ai among its customers. In December 2025, we closed a $50M Series A led by Dawn Capital, with Comcast Ventures, Insight Partners, a16z Speedrun, and Speedinvest — bringing total funding to $66M. We're expanding rapidly across new modalities and growing our teams in London and San Francisco. This is a pivotal moment in Runware's growth — and this role sits at the heart of it.

Role Summary

Runware is looking for a Senior Partnerships Manager to own and scale our strategic relationships with the world’s leading AI model providers. This person will ensure we have the strongest possible commercial terms, roadmap visibility, product access, market insights, and strategic value from our model-provider ecosystem. They will be the central owner for model-provider partnerships and will work closely with Product, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Finance, and Legal to turn external AI partnerships into measurable business value. This is a senior, cross-functional commercial role for someone who is an excellent negotiator, a trusted relationship-builder, and a fast learner in a rapidly changing AI market. The ideal candidate can build deep relationships externally, negotiate hard commercially, and translate model-provider capabilities into internal product decisions, customer-facing value, and improved unit economics.

What You’ll Do

• Own and negotiate strategic model-provider relationships: Manage and deepen relationships with the leading generative media model providers - spanning frontier labs, generative media model creators, open-source communities, audio and 3D model providers, and inference infrastructure partners. Our current ecosystem includes partners such as Google, OpenAI, Black Forest Labs, ElevenLabs, Luma AI, ByteDance, Runway, and Ideogram, among many others across image, video, audio, and 3D modalities. You will own the full commercial relationship end-to-end and maintain strong visibility into partner roadmaps, launches, pricing changes, model capabilities, and strategic opportunities.
• Negotiate best-in-market commercial terms: Lead negotiations on pricing, volume commitments, credits, preferred access, support levels, SLAs, roadmap visibility, co-marketing, launch support, enterprise terms, and non-standard strategic deal structures.
• Turn partnerships into business value: Identify and execute opportunities that improve product capabilities, reduce costs, improve margins, accelerate model launches, enhance customer experience, or differentiate Runware in the market.
• Coordinate across internal teams: Act as the connective tissue between model providers and Product, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Finance, Legal, and leadership. Coordinate product evaluation, integration handoffs with Product and Engineering, customer messaging, sales enablement, finance modeling, and legal/commercial review.
• Maintain AI market intelligence: Track new model releases, benchmark shifts, pricing changes, context-window improvements, multimodal capabilities, latency and reliability tradeoffs, enterprise terms, ecosystem moves, and competitor access. Convert this information into clear internal updates and recommendations.
• Drive partner-led launches on the commercial side: Coordinate timing with model creators, secure preferred or exclusive access, align launch narratives across Marketing and Sales, partner with Product and Engineering on the integration build, and ensure launches translate into measurable pipeline impact.
• Support GTM and customer communication: Help Sales and Marketing translate model-provider updates into customer-facing value, launch narratives, partner comparison notes, competitive positioning, sales enablement, and customer-ready messaging.
• Build a scalable partnership operating rhythm: Create and maintain partner.