What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior Partnerships Manager position at Black Forest Labs?
What if the future of visual AI isn't just about better models—but about reimagining how they reach the world?
We're the ~50-person team behind FLUX.1, FLUX.2, and Stable Diffusion—models with 400M downloads that have become infrastructure for everyone from frontier labs to Fortune 500 companies. Our founding team pioneered latent diffusion and wrote papers that changed the field. Now we're exploring a harder question: How do breakthrough models become platforms that reshape entire industries?
That's where you come in.
What You'll Pioneer
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 with wildly different needs? What distribution channels don't exist yet—but should?
You'll be working 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, you're designing pricing models for capabilities we just shipped. You'll forge partnerships that create entirely new categories—and sometimes discover that the deal we thought made sense needs to be completely reimagined.
You'll be the person who:
How do we build commercial models flexible enough to serve both API users and enterprises running our models on-premise—without fragmenting our focus? What does "partnership" even mean when foundation models are becoming computational infrastructure? Where are the distribution channels we're not seeing yet? (Two years ago, who predicted that local model deployment would become a primary monetization path?)
How do we price capabilities that literally didn't exist six months ago? What does open-source-adjacent business development look like at scale? How do we maintain our European sensibility—rigorous, collaborative, uncompromising on quality—while moving at Silicon Valley speed?
We don't have all the answers. That's why this role exists.
Who Thrives Here
You've done serious business development before—preferably in technical domains where you had to learn fast, think structurally, and convince skeptics. Maybe you've sold APIs, licensed models, or built partnerships in cloud/SaaS. You understand enough about foundation models to have real conversations with engineers, and you're genuinely curious about where this technology is heading (not just where it is today).
You're comfortable with ambiguity. When a potential 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 can switch between strategic thinking (What if we structured this as a co-development partnership?) and tactical execution (Let me draft the MSA and coordinate with Legal).
You care about the craft. You want to work with a small, technically exceptional team that's building in public and pushing boundaries—not a giant org where politics matters more than product. You're energized by hard problems, not intimidated by them.
Crucially: You have strong opinions about how this market should evolve, and you're ready to shape it rather than react to it.
You likely have:
We're not just signing contracts — we're figuring out what a healthy, generative-AI-native ecosystem looks like.
Every partnership teaches us something new: how our models behave at scale in the wild; which use cases are ready for prime time; where our pricing, reliability or product surface need to evolve. Every successful integration becomes a blueprint for a new category of customer. Every mis-step sharpens our sense of where we should and shouldn't play.
If you're excited by questions like "what should the default partnership model for frontier image and video generation look like in three years?" and you want to help define that answer rather than inherit it, we should talk.
We're based in Europe and value depth over noise, collaboration over hero culture, and honest technical conversations over hype. Our models have been downloaded hundreds of millions of times, but we're still a ~50-person team learning what's possible at the edge of generative AI.
We're the ~50-person team behind FLUX.1, FLUX.2, and Stable Diffusion—models with 400M downloads that have become infrastructure for everyone from frontier labs to Fortune 500 companies. Our founding team pioneered latent diffusion and wrote papers that changed the field. Now we're exploring a harder question: How do breakthrough models become platforms that reshape entire industries?
That's where you come in.
What You'll Pioneer
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 with wildly different needs? What distribution channels don't exist yet—but should?
You'll be working 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, you're designing pricing models for capabilities we just shipped. You'll forge partnerships that create entirely new categories—and sometimes discover that the deal we thought made sense needs to be completely reimagined.
You'll be the person who:
- Drive business growth through strategic partnerships and custom deal development, from initial outreach through negotiation to close
- Manage and nurture key partner relationships that evolve as rapidly as our technology does
- Develop and implement pricing strategies for capabilities that may not have existed six months ago
- Collaborate with Research, Engineering, Finance, and Legal to lead large, multi-faceted product, data, and distribution deals
- Help forge new distribution and monetization channels—identifying opportunities the market hasn't imagined yet
- Translate technical capabilities into commercial opportunities, working directly with our technical team to understand and communicate product requirements
- Structure partnership models that serve both API users and enterprises running models on-premise without fragmenting focus
How do we build commercial models flexible enough to serve both API users and enterprises running our models on-premise—without fragmenting our focus? What does "partnership" even mean when foundation models are becoming computational infrastructure? Where are the distribution channels we're not seeing yet? (Two years ago, who predicted that local model deployment would become a primary monetization path?)
How do we price capabilities that literally didn't exist six months ago? What does open-source-adjacent business development look like at scale? How do we maintain our European sensibility—rigorous, collaborative, uncompromising on quality—while moving at Silicon Valley speed?
We don't have all the answers. That's why this role exists.
Who Thrives Here
You've done serious business development before—preferably in technical domains where you had to learn fast, think structurally, and convince skeptics. Maybe you've sold APIs, licensed models, or built partnerships in cloud/SaaS. You understand enough about foundation models to have real conversations with engineers, and you're genuinely curious about where this technology is heading (not just where it is today).
You're comfortable with ambiguity. When a potential 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 can switch between strategic thinking (What if we structured this as a co-development partnership?) and tactical execution (Let me draft the MSA and coordinate with Legal).
You care about the craft. You want to work with a small, technically exceptional team that's building in public and pushing boundaries—not a giant org where politics matters more than product. You're energized by hard problems, not intimidated by them.
Crucially: You have strong opinions about how this market should evolve, and you're ready to shape it rather than react to it.
You likely have:
- Proven track record in business development, partnerships, or commercial roles where you built something from ambiguity—ideally in AI, cloud, or technical infrastructure (experience with diffusion models is a plus)
- Deep comfort with SaaS business models, API pricing, cloud consulting models, and enterprise licensing (the more creative structures you've designed, the better)
- Ability to translate between technical and commercial conversations—you don't need to code, but you need to understand what's hard and why
- Strong relationship-building skills with track record of maintaining long-term partnerships that extend beyond initial contracts
- Analytical rigor and strong market research capabilities—you make decisions based on data, market signals, and honest assessment of what's working (and what isn't)
- Familiarity with Foundation Models, GenAI technologies, and their business applications
- Excellent communication skills with ability to explain complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders
- Early-stage, high-growth startup experience where you wore multiple hats and moved fast
- Prior experience with business deals around diffusion models for image and video generation
- Experience with B2B API and model weight licensing sales models
- Passion for open source software and prior experience navigating open-source business models
- Real curiosity about where visual AI is heading (not just where it's been)
We're not just signing contracts — we're figuring out what a healthy, generative-AI-native ecosystem looks like.
Every partnership teaches us something new: how our models behave at scale in the wild; which use cases are ready for prime time; where our pricing, reliability or product surface need to evolve. Every successful integration becomes a blueprint for a new category of customer. Every mis-step sharpens our sense of where we should and shouldn't play.
If you're excited by questions like "what should the default partnership model for frontier image and video generation look like in three years?" and you want to help define that answer rather than inherit it, we should talk.
We're based in Europe and value depth over noise, collaboration over hero culture, and honest technical conversations over hype. Our models have been downloaded hundreds of millions of times, but we're still a ~50-person team learning what's possible at the edge of generative AI.