Senior Partnerships Manager
Black Forest Labs · San Francisco · €135,000–€190,000 (stated in the posting)
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 building the foundational layer for visual intelligence: multimodal models trained jointly on images, video, audio, and action to see, generate, and understand the world.
Our founding team pioneered latent diffusion and Stable Diffusion, the breakthroughs that made generative AI accessible to millions. With FLUX, we're pushing into generative media at scale, machines that act in the physical world, and emerging applications in computer use.
Our FLUX models top public benchmarks and run in production in some of the world's biggest platforms. We're a small, fast growing research lab competing with the largest companies in the world. From our labs in Freiburg to San Francisco, we're building what comes next.
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. You’ll be based in the US and work from your home location, with one week each month spent with us in San Francisco to stay connected with the team.
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
Note: We may use AI-assisted tools to help organize applications. All hiring decisions are always made by our team.
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