About this role
At Cloudflare, we are on a mission to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks that powers millions of websites and other Internet properties for customers ranging from individual bloggers to SMBs to Fortune 500 companies. Cloudflare protects and accelerates any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare all have web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top Company Cultures list and ranked among the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company.
We realize people do not fit into neat boxes. We are looking for curious and empathetic individuals who are committed to developing themselves and learning new skills, and we are ready to help you do that. We cannot complete our mission without building a diverse and inclusive team. We hire the best people based on an evaluation of their potential and support them throughout their time at Cloudflare. Come join us!
Available Locations: San Francisco, CA
About the Role
As a Principal Ecosystem Partnerships Manager, your mission is to make Cloudflare the premier destination for discovering, running, and scaling AI models. This is a high-impact, strategic role where you will own the partner strategy and execution end-to-end. Operating with significant autonomy, you will navigate the entire partnership lifecycle from initial strategy and outreach to landing models in production. You will serve as the essential link between Cloudflare’s internal Product, Engineering, Legal, and Finance teams and the broader AI ecosystem, acting as the connective tissue between ecosystem strategy and platform execution.
What You’ll Do
- Ecosystem Strategy: Define and execute the overarching partner strategy for Cloudflare’s AI Developer Platform. Serve as the strategic lead for high-value model provider relationships.
- Marketplace Curation: Identify, recruit, and onboard top-tier model providers across image, video, multimodal, speech, code, and LLMs. Maintain a data-driven "Top-X" provider list aligned with developer demand and performance benchmarks.
- Negotiation & Deal Leadership: Lead complex negotiations covering pricing, revenue share, SLAs, and licensing. Partner closely with Legal and Finance to structure scalable, durable agreements that protect Cloudflare’s flexibility and margin.
- Launch Execution: Own a repeatable launch pipeline (validation, performance and cost checks, documentation, and quickstarts). Ensure models are easy to discover and production-ready for developers within the Workers AI Marketplace.
- Commercial Ownership: Set volume tiers and pricing logic while tracking unit economics and model-level profitability. Drive GTM efforts focused on driving actual deployment and usage.
- Operational Excellence: Lead business reviews, roadmap previews, and incident response with key partners. Act as a trusted counterpart to both external providers and internal leadership.
- Industry Insights: Stay ahead of generative AI trends and new model launches to ensure Cloudflare remains the go-to platform for the widest selection of high-performance models.
Who You Are
- Expert Partner Leader: You bring extensive experience (typically 8+ years) in AI ecosystems, partnerships, or business development, with a proven track record of signing and scaling high-profile providers.
- Technically Fluent: You are deeply comfortable discussing APIs, tokens, context windows, throughput, and GPU performance tradeoffs. You can hold your own in technical discussions with engineers and legal discussions with counsel.
- Strategic & Pragmatic: You possess strong product intuition and can distinguish between hype and sustainable value, making hard prioritization decisions based on quality and cost.
- Action-Oriented: You have a strong bias for action, moving quickly and operating independently even in highly ambiguous environments.
- Exceptional Communicator: You are a clear writer and an effective negotiator who remains calm during escalations and builds trust across diverse functional teams.
Compensation
Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.
- For Bay Area based hires: Estimated annual salary of $295,000 - $328,000
Equity
This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan.
Benefits
Cloudflare offers a complete package of benefits and programs to support you and your family. Our benefits programs can help you pay health care expenses, support caregiving, build capital for the future and make life a little easier and fun! The below is a description of our benefits for employees in the United States, and benefits may vary for employees based outside the U.S.
Health & Welfare Benefits
- Medical/Rx Insurance
- Dental Insurance
- Vision Insurance
- Flexible Spending Accounts
- Commuter Spending Accounts
- Fertility & Family Forming Benefits
- On-demand mental health support and Employee Assistance Program
- Global Travel Medical Insurance
Financial Benefits
- Short and Long Term Disability Insurance
- Life & Accident Insurance
- 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan
- Employee Stock Participation Plan
Time Off
- Flexible paid time off covering vacation and sick leave
- Leave programs, including parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave
What Makes Cloudflare Special?
We’re not just a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company. We’re a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company with a soul. Fundamental to our mission to help build a better Internet is protecting the free and open Internet.
Project Galileo: Since 2014, we've equipped more than 2,400 journalism and civil society organizations in 111 countries with powerful tools to defend themselves against attacks that would otherwise censor their work, technology already used by Cloudflare’s enterprise customers--at no cost.
Athenian Project: In 2017, we created the Athenian Project to ensure that state and local governments have the highest level of protection and reliability for free, so that their constituents have access to election information and voter registration. Since the project, we've provided services to more than 425 local government election websites in 33 states.
1.1.1.1: We released 1.1.1.1 to help fix the foundation of the Internet by building a faster, more secure and privacy-centric public DNS resolver. This is available publicly for everyone to use - it is the first consumer-focused service Cloudflare has ever released. Here’s the deal - we don’t store client IP addresses never, ever. We will continue to abide by our privacy commitment and ensure that no user data is sold to advertisers or used to target consumers.
Sound like something you’d like to be a part of? We’d love to hear from you!
This position may require access to information protected under U.S. export control laws, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations. Please note that any offer of employment may be conditioned on your authorization to receive software or technology controlled under these U.S. export laws without sponsorship for an export license.
Cloudflare is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunity for all people and place great value in both diversity and inclusiveness. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to their, or any other person's, perceived or actual race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, family care status, or any other basis protected by law. We are an AA/Veterans/Disabled Employer.
Cloudflare provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities. Please tell us if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job. Examples of reasonable accommodations include, but are not limited to, changing the application process, providing documents in an alternate format, using a sign language interpreter, or using specialized equipment. If you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job, please contact us via e-mail at [email protected] or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.
Other facts
About Cloudflare
Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET) is the leading connectivity cloud company. It empowers organizations to make their employees, applications and networks faster and more secure everywhere, while reducing complexity and cost. Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud delivers the most full-featured, unified platform of cloud-native products and developer tools, so any organization can gain the control they need to work, develop, and accelerate their business.
Powered by one of the world’s largest and most interconnected networks, Cloudflare blocks billions of threats online for its customers every day. It is trusted by millions of organizations – from the largest brands to entrepreneurs and small businesses to nonprofits, humanitarian groups, and governments across the globe.
What you'll do
- The Ecosystem Partnerships Manager will define and execute the partner strategy for Cloudflare’s AI Developer Platform and lead the entire partnership lifecycle. This includes identifying and onboarding model providers, negotiating agreements, and ensuring models are production-ready for developers.
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