Partner Manager, AI Ecosystems

About the role

Apollo is one of the most-used data and go-to-market platforms inside the AI agent ecosystem - reachable today through Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and a growing list of agent and headless surfaces.

That ecosystem is being rewritten in real time: MCP, skills, and plugins have opened entirely new surfaces for integration, collaboration, and partnership that didn't exist eighteen months ago, and what a "partnership" even means in this space is still being defined as foundation model capabilities evolve.

This role owns that frontier for Apollo: deepening our relationships with the foundation model companies, agent harnesses, and AI-native platforms we already work with, and identifying the surfaces we're not yet part of.

What you'll do

• Own and Deepen Apollo's Frontier AI Partnerships
• Own Apollo's relationships with foundation model companies, agent harnesses, and AI-native platforms - both the ones Apollo already works with and the ones it doesn't yet
• Go deeper with existing platform relationships: more surface area, better placement, tighter integration, and a real seat at the table as their roadmaps evolve
• Continuously scan the landscape for new surfaces Apollo should be part of, and build the case for where to invest next
• Lead on partner review, certification, and compliance processes (e.g., app store/plugin submissions) and drive resolution when a partner's feedback loop stalls or lacks specifics.
• Drive monetization strategies within each partner surface - identifying where usage, credit consumption, or connector adoption can be grown, and building the plan to convert platform reach into revenue
• Build the Next Generation of Apollo Surfaces
• Partner with platforms - and often multiple ISVs at once - to design and ship new plugins and skills that make Apollo genuinely useful to people running it headless, not just technically accessible via API
• Work with Apollo's own R&D team to translate what a partner's surface can support into what Apollo should actually build for it
• Treat every new surface (an MCP server, a skill, a plugin, an agent tool) as its own product decision: what it should do, who it's for, and how it gets discovered
• Stay on the Frontier
• Track foundation model and agent-ecosystem developments as they happen - this category has no fixed playbook, and the right way to partner with it changes as model capabilities change
• Translate what's changing in the market into a point of view Apollo can act on before it becomes obvious
• Be the person internally who can explain, credibly, what's actually happening in this space and why it matters for Apollo's partnership strategy

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years in technology/API partnerships, developer relations, or a closely related technical partnerships role, ideally touching foundation model, agent, or AI-native platform ecosystems
• Genuine technical fluency: comfortable in API docs, MCP concepts, and integration architecture discussions with both a partner's engineering team and Apollo's own R&D
• Demonstrated ability to track and make sense of a fast-moving, still-forming category - you can explain what's changed in the last month and why it matters
• Comfortable working multi-party: coordinating a partnership that involves a platform and one or more other ISVs at the same time
• Experience working in a category with no established playbook - you build the process and the point of view as you go

Preferred Qualifications

• Existing relationships or experience with foundation model companies, agent harness platforms, or the broader AI-native/builder ecosystem
• Experience designing or shipping an MCP server, skill, or plugin - yours or a partner's
• Background in developer relations, technical partner management, or a product-adjacent partnerships role at a SaaS or platform company