PortfolioTeam
TwitterLinkedinFacebookInstagramYoutubeSubstack
Loading job description…
a16z

Software Is Eating the World

XLinkedInSubstack
© 2026 Andreessen Horowitz.
All Portfolio JobsCompaniesDisclosures
All portfolio jobs/Black Forest Labs
Black Forest Labs

a16z portfolio company

Senior Partnerships Manager

Location
San Francisco (United States), San Francisco, CA, United States, Seattle (United States)…
Work arrangement
Remote
Job type
Full-time

About the role

Posted Aug 26, 2026

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.

Explore what’s next at Black Forest Labs.

Apply for this role

At a glance

Location
San Francisco (United States) · San Francisco, CA, United States · Seattle (United States) · Seattle, Washington, United States · Los Angeles (United States) · Los Angeles, California, United States · Austin (United States) · Austin, Texas, United States
Workplace
Remote
Employment
Full-time
Team
GTM
Apply for this role

You’ll be taken to Black Forest Labs to apply.

The company

Black Forest Labs

Black Forest Labs

We’re the leading frontier AI research lab, continuously building the most advanced technology that shapes the visual understanding of the world. Our team pioneered Stable Diffusion, Stable Video Diffusion, and FLUX.1 and 2 – benchmarks in the evolution of generative AI. Today, these foundations power millions of creations worldwide, from individual artists to enterprise applications. Our most recent models power a wide range of products – turning imagination into reality with precision, speed, and creative control.

Series B51–200 employeesInfra
More roles at Black Forest Labs

Explore what’s next at Black Forest Labs.

Apply for this role