Strategic Partnership Manager - Frontier Labs

About Gray Swan Gray Swan is on a mission to empower the world to use AI safely and securely. We evaluate AI models for the leading frontier labs along with building real-time threat detection and adaptive adversarial red teaming agents for teams deploying AI. We're a team of approximately 70 people, well-funded, growing quickly. Our work directly influences how the world deploys AI agents and systems at scale. Learn more about how we work. Learn more about how we work.

The Role We’re looking for a Strategic Partnership Manager to own a portfolio of frontier lab relationships and lead the programs we deliver for them. You’ll help researchers and technical teams turn evolving questions into clear engagements, coordinate delivery across Gray Swan, and identify opportunities to deepen each partnership. You’ll work as a peer alongside our existing partnerships team, giving assigned accounts focused attention from planning through delivery and expansion. You’ll own account plans, partner communication, and program follow-through, while working with Frontier Lab Safety leadership, researchers, red teamers, engineers, and commercial teams to make sound commitments. You’ll also help improve delivery excellence across FLS: clearer capacity planning, earlier visibility into risks, consistent quality and acceptance checks, and practical processes that help teams deliver reliably across accounts. Programs may include automated and human red teaming, model and agent evaluations, benchmark development, and AI research. You should be comfortable asking technical questions, identifying ambiguity, and making progress while research priorities evolve.

What You’ll Do: Lead frontier lab engagements

• Own the strategy and operating plan for assigned lab accounts; translate partner goals into scoped programs, delivery milestones, success measures, and acceptance criteria with technical leads.

• Coordinate model access, evaluation setup, staffing, review cycles, and customer dependencies. Keep critical decisions and owners clear across concurrent engagements.

• Manage changes deliberately: explain the effect on quality, timing, cost, and capacity; develop options; and secure agreement before commitments change.

Build trusted working relationships

• Run useful partner meetings and maintain clear written updates, action items, decisions, and escalation paths.

• Understand how each lab intends to use our work. Translate technical progress and limitations for researchers, product leads, and commercial stakeholders.

• Raise difficult issues early, make a recommendation, and maintain trust through accurate communication and dependable follow-through.

Deliver work partners can use

• Partner with technical owners to check that evaluation results, datasets, and reports answer the agreed question and meet delivery requirements.

• Track model and evaluation configurations, quality checks, and material limitations so partners can interpret results correctly.

• Close the loop after delivery: confirm acceptance, understand customer use, collect feedback, and turn lessons into better programs and product requirements.

Build an effective operating model

• Bring order to chaos of fast-moving engagements: Maintain an accurate record of stakeholders, commitments, contracted scope, usage, and upcoming commercial milestones; coordinate procurement, legal, and finance handoffs.

• Own expansion planning for assigned labs: identify unmet needs and deeper adoption opportunities, then develop and advance feasible proposals with product and commercial leads.

• Improve planning across FLS with a shared view of capacity, commitments, dependencies, and delivery risks; build lightweight templates and workflows that make strong execution repeatable.

What You Bring

• A record of independently delivering complex technical projects with external stakeholders, developed through program management, technical partnerships, customer engineering, consulting, or a related role. 5+ years of relevant experience.

• Strong program-management fundamentals: clear scope, milestones, dependencies, resource planning, risk management, change control, and acceptance.

• Clear, concise writing and the ability to lead productive conversations with technical specialists and senior stakeholders.

• Enough software & AI fluency to reason about APIs, integrations, logs, configurations, and agent traces to work effectively with engineers when a program is blocked.

• Good judgment about commitments, competing priorities, and sensitive partner information, with examples of earning trust across organizational boundaries.

How You Work

• Ownership: you notice gaps, make progress, and close the loop on outcomes.

• Collaboration: you seek expertise, handle disagreement directly, and make it easier for others to contribute.

• Leadership: you create clarity, recommend a path, and align people around difficult decisions.

• Systems thinking: you connect individual requests to shared constraints and improve how the whole program operates.

Bonus Experience

• Experience managing customer projects from agreed scope and purchasing through delivery, customer sign-off, and billing.

• Working knowledge of the ML lifecycle and AI evaluation: training versus inference, datasets and holdouts, evaluation metrics, and the limits of conclusions drawn from a test.

• Frontier lab partnerships, AI safety evaluations, adversarial testing, or research programs with uncertain outcomes.

We welcome different paths into this work. If you can demonstrate the core skills and learn unfamiliar domains quickly, we encourage you to apply.

What We Offer: We offer a competitive compensation package designed to reward impact and incentivize growth. Our compensation philosophy is informed by our current valuation and recent industry data. Compensation: $185,000 - $270,000 (base salary will be determined by a multitude of factors including, location, level, and previous experience) plus a meaningful equity package. Benefits:

• 401k with up to 4% matching

• 28 days annual leave (vacation + holidays)

• Health, dental, and vision coverage

• Catered lunches (Pittsburgh office)

• Flexible work arrangements

• Visa sponsorship available for exceptional candidates

Interview Process 🔎 Application review. We read everything; we’ll respond within 10 days. ✏️ Online technical screen (15 min). Complete a simple, job-relevant exercise. 🗣 Intro call (30 min). We learn about you; you learn about us. 🧑‍💻 Technical interview (90 min). Live coding with some tasks requiring AIand others not. 🗣 Experience & culture interview (60 min). Conversational exploration of the skills fit. 😇 Reference checks. We’ll reach out to 3-5 references that you provide. 📃 Offer. If it’s mutual, we move fast. How to Apply Submit your resume, link to your portfolio, and answer the questions on the application.