Account Executive, Bay Area — AI & Agentic Security

Operant AI | San Francisco Bay Area (Hybrid) | Account Executive

About Operant AI

Operant AI is the industry's most comprehensive real-time security platform for AI, Agents, and MCP. Recognized across six Gartner critical AI security reports — including AI TRiSM, MCP Gateways, API Protection, and Securing Custom-Built AI Agents — Operant is the category-defining company protecting the agentic AI era. Our platform delivers real-time discovery, detection, and defense across the full AI stack: LLM APIs, MCP servers and clients, autonomous agents, and the APIs they depend on.

Founded by former Apple, VMware, and Google executives and backed by Felicis and SineWave Ventures, we're a fast-moving team on a mission to make AI innovation safe at scale.

The Role

We're looking for an Account Executive, West Coast based in the San Francisco Bay Area who lives at the intersection of cybersecurity and AI — someone who can walk into a CISO's office and talk prompt injection, and then walk into an AI platform team and talk agentic workflows and MCP tool poisoning. This is a quota-carrying, “roll up your sleeves,” field-oriented role selling Operant's AI Gatekeeper, MCP Gateway, and Agent Protector products to enterprise and high-growth tech companies across the Bay Area and broader West Coast.

You will own the full sales cycle for your account list — from prospecting and discovery through technical validation and close — and will work closely with Solutions Engineering, Product, and Marketing to drive pipeline and revenue in your territory, while maintaining brand equity and customer trust by speaking expertly about the product and the industry with in-the-know buyers and teams who already have strong knowledge in the space. You should be able to clearly articulate the exceptional differentiation that Operant’s products provide in the market and operate with a shortened sales cycle that is in-line with the speed of the AI boom in SF (not a multi-year long traditional cyber sales cycle with multi-month long POCs) and cultivate and close highly qualified ICP leads, both inbound and outbound, who have already demonstrated urgency in filling open budget items and solving identified, critical security problems that are affecting their business-critical AI road maps, development, and growth goals.

What You'll Do

• Own and grow a Bay Area-anchored territory, targeting enterprise security buyers across industries including tech, financial services, healthcare, and defense.
• Drive net-new ARR by identifying and closing opportunities for Operant's AI Gatekeeper, MCP Gateway, and Agent Protector solutions, as well as new solutions launching multiple times per quarter. The ability to quickly get up to speed on new product and feature launches is critical.
• Navigate complex, multi-stakeholder sales cycles involving CISOs, AI/ML platform leads, security architects, and DevOps teams.
• Translate highly technical concepts — MCP security, agentic risk, runtime AI defense, non-human identity (NHI) controls — into clear business value for executive audiences.
• Partner with Solutions Engineers on technical deep-dives, POCs, and proof-of-value engagements, while still being able to converse at a technical level with technical CISO’s, VPs of engineering, and heads of AI who start first conversations with phrases like, “Don’t waste my time with marketing speak, just tell me if you can do x, y, or z and how long will it take.” You must be able to answer those questions yourself without passing it over immediately to a Sales Engineer. 
• Develop and manage a healthy pipeline with accurate forecasting in CRM (Apollo, Hubspot).
• Represent Operant AI at Bay Area and West Coast conferences, industry events, and executive briefings.
• Collaborate with channel and alliance partners to expand reach and accelerate deals.

What You Bring

Experience

• 3-5 years of B2B sales experience, with a track record of closing enterprise cybersecurity deals.
• Demonstrable experience selling cybersecurity solutions — ideally in runtime security, API security, cloud security, or AI/ML security.
• Working knowledge of AI and agentic systems — you understand what LLMs, AI agents, and MCP are, and why they introduce new attack surfaces.
• Experience selling to security personas (CISO, SecOps, AppSec) and technical platform personas (AI/ML leads, DevSecOps, platform engineering).
• Proven ability to run a full sales cycle independently in a fast-paced, early-stage environment.

Skills

• Strong technical acumen — you can hold your own in conversations about prompt injection, zero-trust, API security, and agentic AI without needing an SE in every meeting.
• Excellent discovery and value-selling skills; you ask great questions and connect product capability to customer pain.
• Clear, concise communicator — in writing, in decks, and in the room.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and motivated by building in a category-creating environment.
• Passionate lifelong learner who proactively self-teaches to stay in the know about technology and the industry at the absolute forefront of AI and Agentic development, and is able to translate that knowledge into pragmatic and empathetic understanding of the problems the buyers are trying to solve and how those problems impact end-users and real people.

Preferred

• Prior experience at a cybersecurity startup or category-defining security vendor.
• Familiarity with the AI security landscape — AI TRiSM, OWASP Top 10 for LLMs, MCP, and related frameworks.
• Existing relationships with West Coast enterprise security or AI platform teams.
• Bachelor's degree in a relevant field, or equivalent experience.

Why Operant

• Category leadership: The only vendor featured across six Gartner AI security reports in the last year alone — you'll be selling into genuine market demand with analyst-validated air cover.
• Right timing: MCP and agentic AI adoption is exploding. You'll be ahead of the wave, not chasing it.
• Compelling product: Runtime defense that actually works — real-time blocking, inline data redaction, and zero-trust enforcement built for AI agents.
• Mission-driven team: Founded by operators from Apple, VMware, and Google who've built at scale before.
• Competitive compensation: Base salary + uncapped commission + equity + full benefits.

Technical Alliances Lead

Operant AI | Full-Time | Hybrid Set-up in the SF Bay Area

About Operant AI

Operant AI is the industry's most comprehensive real-time security platform for AI, Agents, and MCP. Recognized across six Gartner critical AI security reports — including AI TRiSM, MCP Gateways, API Protection, and Securing Custom-Built AI Agents — Operant is the category-defining company protecting the agentic AI era. Our platform delivers real-time discovery, detection, and defense across the full AI stack: LLM APIs, MCP servers and clients, autonomous agents, and the APIs they depend on.

Founded by former Apple, VMware, and Google executives and backed by Felicis and SineWave Ventures, we're a fast-moving team on a mission to make AI innovation safe at scale.

The Role

We're looking for a Director of Technical Alliances to own and scale our strategic partnerships with leading AI infrastructure providers — including Cerebras, Nutanix, Tenstorrent, and others we'll build together. This is a senior, high-impact role sitting at the intersection of technical depth and business development, designed for someone who can walk into a partner's engineering team in the morning and present a joint go-to-market strategy to their VP of Partnerships in the afternoon.

You'll be the primary relationship owner and technical authority for our most important infrastructure partnerships — driving integration strategy, enabling joint customer success, and building the connective tissue between Operant AI and the ecosystems we depend on and strengthen.

What You'll Do

Partnership Strategy & Executive Engagement

• Own the end-to-end relationship with key AI infrastructure partners, including executive alignment, business planning, and QBRs
• Develop and execute joint go-to-market strategies that drive measurable pipeline and revenue for both Operant AI and our partners
• Establish Operant AI as the preferred security and observability partner across AI compute and cloud infrastructure ecosystems
• Identify and prioritize new strategic alliance opportunities as the AI infrastructure landscape evolves

Technical Leadership & Integration Oversight

• Define the technical integration vision and roadmap for each partner relationship, working closely with Operant AI's engineering and product teams
• Serve as a hands-on technical authority in partner conversations — capable of diving deep into AI inference infrastructure, runtime environments, orchestration layers, and security integration points
• Oversee the end-to-end execution of joint integrations from architecture through production readiness, ensuring quality, reliability, and mutual value
• Translate complex technical requirements between partner engineering teams and Operant AI's internal stakeholders

Joint Customer & Revenue Development

• Drive co-sell and co-solution motions with partner field and sales teams to source and close shared customer opportunities
• Act as a trusted technical advisor to joint customers evaluating or deploying Operant AI on partner infrastructure
• Build joint solution briefs, reference architectures, and enablement materials that equip partner teams to position Operant AI effectively
• Track and report on partner-influenced pipeline, integration adoption, and customer outcomes

Ecosystem Building

• Represent Operant AI at partner events, technical summits, and industry conferences
• Champion partner needs internally — providing feedback loops to product and engineering that shape Operant AI's roadmap
• Build and maintain strong relationships across partner organizations at the technical, field, and executive levels

What We're Looking For

Experience

• 8+ years in technical alliances, partner engineering, sales engineering, or a combination thereof — ideally within AI, cloud infrastructure, or enterprise software
• Demonstrated experience managing strategic technology partnerships with hardware or infrastructure providers (AI accelerators, cloud platforms, hyperconverged infrastructure, or similar)
• Track record of driving partner-sourced or partner-influenced revenue and building scalable co-sell motions
• Experience working with or alongside AI infrastructure platforms (e.g., AI compute, inference serving, data center fabric) strongly preferred

Technical Depth

• Strong working knowledge of AI/ML infrastructure — including inference hardware, distributed compute, containerized workloads, and Kubernetes-based orchestration
• Ability to engage credibly with partner engineering teams on integration design, API architecture, and security considerations
• Experience with enterprise security, observability, or runtime platforms is a significant plus
• Comfort reading and discussing technical documentation, architecture diagrams, and integration specs

Business & Leadership Skills

• Exceptional executive presence — able to build trust and drive alignment with C-suite and VP-level contacts at partner organizations
• Strong commercial instincts with the ability to structure joint business plans, negotiate partnership terms, and align incentives across organizations
• Highly collaborative — skilled at influencing without authority across internal engineering, product, marketing, and sales teams
• Excellent written and verbal communication; able to distill complex technical and business concepts for any audience

Why This Role

• Own a greenfield: You'll shape how Operant AI builds its partner ecosystem from the ground up, with room to define the playbook
• Work with the best: Cerebras, Nutanix, and Tenstorrent are building the compute infrastructure that will power the next decade of AI — you'll be at that table
• Real technical weight: This isn't a badge-collecting alliance role — you'll drive integration strategy and have the technical credibility to back it up
• Mission that matters: AI security and observability is one of the most important unsolved problems in enterprise AI. Operant AI is solving it.

Operant AI is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to building an inclusive environment for all employees.