Senior Partnerships Manager
This role can be office-based in San Francisco, USA or remote-first, with a requirement to be in the office one full week per month.
About Black Forest Labs
We’re the team behind Latent Diffusion, Stable Diffusion, and FLUX-foundational technologies that changed how the world creates images and video. We’re creating the generative models that power how people make images and video-tools used by millions of creators, developers, and businesses worldwide. Our FLUX models are among the most advanced in the world, and we’re just getting started.
Headquartered in Freiburg, Germany with a growing presence in San Francisco, we’re scaling fast while staying true to what makes us different: research excellence, open science, and building technology that expands human creativity.
Why This Role
This isn't a "close deals and hit quotas" role. You'll be architecting the commercial layer of a technology that's still being invented. What does pricing look like when your product gets exponentially better every quarter? How do you structure partnerships when your API serves both scrappy startups and global enterprises? What distribution channels don't exist yet-but should?
You'll work directly with our technical team to translate research breakthroughs into market opportunities, often before the market knows it needs them. One week you might be negotiating custom enterprise agreements; the next, designing pricing models for capabilities we just shipped.
What You’ll Work On
Drive business growth through strategic partnerships and custom deal development, from initial outreach through close
Develop pricing strategies for capabilities that may not have existed six months ago
Collaborate with Research, Engineering, Finance, and Legal to lead complex product, data, and distribution deals
Identify and forge new distribution and monetization channels the market hasn't imagined yet
Translate technical capabilities into commercial opportunities, working directly with engineers to understand product requirements and limitations
Structure partnership models that serve both API users and enterprises running models on-premise
What We’re Looking For
You have deep technical fluency. Either you've worked in image/video generation (at companies building diffusion models, creative tools, or visual AI products) or you come from a technical background-solutions architect, engineer, technical product manager. You can discuss model architectures, inference optimization, and training pipelines with our research team, then translate those capabilities into commercial value propositions.
You've done serious business development in technical domains where you had to learn fast and think structurally. You understand SaaS business models, API pricing, and enterprise licensing. You're comfortable with ambiguity-when a partner asks "Can your model do X?" and X is something we could build but haven't yet, you know how to navigate that conversation honestly.
You care about craft. You want to work with a small, technically exceptional team that's building in public and pushing boundaries. You have strong opinions about how this market should evolve, and you're ready to shape it.
Required:
Technical foundation: Either prior experience in image/video generation companies OR a technical background (engineering, solutions architecture, technical product roles)
Proven track record in BD/partnerships in AI, cloud, or technical infrastructure
Deep understanding of SaaS business models, API pricing, cloud consulting, and enterprise licensing
Ability to hold technical conversations with engineers and translate them into commercial strategy
Strong relationship-building with track record of maintaining long-term partnerships
Analytical rigor and market research capabilities
Nice to have:
Experience with diffusion models for image/video generation
Early-stage, high-growth startup experience
B2B API and model weight licensing sales models
Open-source business model experience
How We Work Together
We’re a distributed team with real offices that people actually use. Depending on your role, you’ll either join us in Freiburg or SF at least 2 days a week (or one full week every other week), or work remotely with a monthly in-person week to stay connected. We’ll cover reasonable travel costs to make this possible. We think in-person time matters, and we’ve structured things to make it accessible to all. We’ll discuss what this will look like for the role during our interview process.
Everything we do is grounded in four values:
Obsessed. We are a frontier research lab. The science has to be right, the understanding deep, the product beautiful.
Low Ego. The work speaks. The best idea wins, no matter who said it. Credit is shared. Nobody is above any task.
Bold. We take the ambitious bet. We ship, we do not wait for conditions to be perfect.
Kind. People over politics. We treat each other with genuine warmth. Agency without empathy creates chaos.
If this sounds like work you’d enjoy, we’d love to hear from you.
Base Annual Salary:
EU €135,000 - €190,000 + variable + equity
US $175,000 - $240,000 + variable + equity