Business Development Lead, AI & LLM Partnerships

Position Overview

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• Job Type: Full-time
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Sonar helps prevent code quality and code security issues from reaching production, amplifies developers' productivity in concert with AI assistants, and improves the developer experience with streamlined workflows. Sonar analyzes all code, regardless of who writes it — your internal team, genAI, or third parties — resulting in more secure, reliable, and maintainable applications. Rooted in the open source community, Sonar’s solutions support over 30 programming languages, frameworks, and infrastructure technologies. Today, Sonar is used by +7M developers and 400K organizations worldwide, including the DoD, Microsoft, NASA, MasterCard, Siemens, and T-Mobile.

We believe in developing great products that are supported by great internal teams and a strong culture. We are highly committed to and obsessed with the company, users, each other, and our open source community. We have high standards and hold each other accountable for acting with positivity, dedication, thoughtfulness, empathy, and passion daily. We are deliberate with our decisions with high clarity of intention. At the same time, we feel extreme urgency and move forward quickly. And lastly, we are highly effective and operationally efficient. We operate collectively as One Team to accomplish our goals.

At Sonar, CODE is more than just an acronym – it's a mindset that defines daily operations.

Why You Should Apply

At Sonar, we’re a group of brilliant, motivated, and driven professionals working hard to help supercharge developers to build better, faster. Sonar helps to continuously improve code quality and code security while reducing developer toil. This means that developers can focus on doing more of what they love and less of what they don’t. Our solutions don’t just solve symptoms of problems – we help fix issues at the source – for all code, whether it's developer-written, AI-generated, or from third parties.

The Impact You Will Have

We are seeking a highly strategic and experienced Business Development professional to join Sonar as the Business Development Lead, AI & LLM Partnerships. Reporting directly to the Chief Growth Officer, you will spearhead Sonar's efforts in this critical domain, building deep, impactful relationships and forging partnerships with leading Foundation Model / Large Language Model (LLM) developers (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, Cohere, Mistral). Your primary goal will be to establish collaborations that build on cutting-edge AI model development and Sonar's unique IP to create innovative solutions for developers. This involves defining partnership structures, negotiating licensing and collaboration agreements, and developing joint go-to-market plans.

On a Daily Basis, You Will

• Strategy Development & Execution: Drive the execution of Sonar’s partnership strategy specifically with LLM providers and the broader Generative AI ecosystem, aligning closely with overall company growth objectives.
• Opportunity Identification & Analysis: Identify, evaluate, and prioritize strategic partnership opportunities. Conduct in-depth market analysis of the LLM landscape, tracking model releases, capabilities, and evolving partnership models.
• Relationship Building & Management: Build, nurture, and manage strong, long-term relationships with key technical, product, and business leaders at major LLM development companies and influential organizations in the AI space.
• Deal Negotiation & Execution: Lead the end-to-end partnership lifecycle with LLM providers: define engagement models, negotiate complex agreements focused on licensing, model training, co-development of solutions, and drive deals to closure.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with internal Sonar teams (Product Management, Engineering, Research, Legal, Marketing, Sales, Finance) to align on LLM partnership priorities, define technical requirements, develop joint sol