About Keak

Keak builds AI products that help businesses operate and grow more efficiently.

We’re hiring an AI Provider Partnerships Lead to own the supply-side relationships behind Cheaper Inference, our OpenAI-compatible API that provides access to leading AI models at discounted, usage-based rates.

Our ability to give customers competitive pricing, strong model availability, and reliable performance depends on building excellent relationships with model developers and inference providers. This person will own those relationships and ensure that our provider network gives Cheaper Inference a durable economic and product advantage.

The role

You’ll be responsible for developing and managing relationships with AI model companies, inference platforms, cloud providers, and other infrastructure partners.

You’ll source new providers, negotiate pricing and commercial terms, manage contracts and renewals, and work with our product and engineering teams to bring new providers and models onto the platform.

This role sits at the intersection of partnerships, strategic sourcing, finance, and AI infrastructure. Your performance will directly affect our model selection, customer pricing, gross margins, reliability, and ability to grow.

What you’ll ownProvider relationships

- Build and maintain relationships with model developers, inference platforms, cloud providers, and AI infrastructure companies.
- Serve as the primary commercial point of contact for Keak’s AI providers.
- Develop trusted relationships with commercial, partnership, product, and technical leaders at each provider.
- Conduct regular business reviews covering usage, performance, pricing, upcoming models, capacity, and shared opportunities.
- Gain early visibility into model launches, pricing changes, capacity constraints, and product roadmaps.
- Resolve commercial and operational issues before they affect customers.

Pricing and commercial negotiations
- Negotiate token pricing, volume discounts, rebates, credits, minimum commitments, payment terms, and other commercial arrangements.
- Build negotiation strategies using Keak’s usage forecasts, provider alternatives, and market pricing.
- Structure agreements that improve unit economics while preserving flexibility as the market changes.
- Evaluate the risks and benefits of prepaid commitments, reserved capacity, exclusivity, and longer-term agreements.
- Renegotiate pricing as usage grows or market rates decline.
- Work with the founders and finance team to understand the effect of each agreement on customer pricing and gross margin.

Provider sourcing and evaluation
- Map the global ecosystem of model developers and inference providers.
- Identify providers that can improve pricing, model coverage, performance, geographic availability, or supply resilience.
- Evaluate each provider’s commercial viability and strategic relevance.
- Coordinate technical evaluations with product and engineering.
- Maintain a qualified pipeline of prospective providers and partnership opportunities.




- Reduce concentration risk by developing competitive alternatives for important models.

Contracts, service levels, and risk
- Own the commercial lifecycle of provider agreements, from initial evaluation through negotiation, execution, renewal, and termination.
- Negotiate requirements related to availability, latency, capacity, support, incident response, and pricing changes.
- Partner with legal and security resources on data retention, privacy, compliance, and data-processing terms.
- Ensure provider agreements support Cheaper Inference’s commitments to customers.
- Monitor contract obligations, renewal dates, usage commitments, and pricing thresholds.
- Maintain contingency plans for provider outages, unexpected price changes, or capacity reductions.

Provider operations
- Coordinate provider and model onboarding with engineering and product.
- Ensure pricing, billing units, model identifiers, limits, and commercial terms are accurately reflected internally.
- Review provider invoices and reconcile them against measured usage and negotiated rates.
- Investigate billing discrepancies, unexpected cost changes, and missed discounts.
- Create a clear operating process for model launches, price changes, provider incidents, and deprecations.
- Help ensure that new commercial agreements translate into operational improvements.

Market intelligence
- Maintain current benchmarks of provider pricing, performance, reliability, and model availability.
- Track new model labs, inference platforms, hardware providers, and changes in market supply.
- Understand how competitors structure their model access and provider relationships.
- Provide the founders with recommendations on commitments, pricing strategy, and supply concentration.
- Identify opportunities to secure preferential access, launch partnerships, or unique commercial arrangements.

What success looks like

Within your 12 weeks, you will have:

- Built strong working relationships with Keak’s most important AI providers.
- Negotiated measurable improvements in provider pricing and commercial terms.
- Improved Cheaper Inference’s gross margin or customer price competitiveness.
- Expanded the number and quality of providers available through the platform.
- Established reliable pricing benchmarks and provider scorecards.
- Created repeatable processes for provider evaluation, negotiation, onboarding, and renewal.
- Reduced provider concentration and commercial risk.
- Improved billing accuracy and visibility into provider costs.
- Secured early or advantageous access to strategically important models.

How success will be measured

Key metrics may include:





- Effective cost per token relative to public provider pricing.
- Gross margin by provider, model, and customer segment.
- Savings secured through negotiations.
- Provider and model coverage.
- Provider reliability and SLA performance.
- Billing accuracy and discrepancy resolution.
- Time required to onboard new providers and models.
- Exposure to minimum commitments and unused capacity.
- Supply concentration and availability of backup providers.

What we’re looking for
- Five or more years of experience in strategic partnerships, vendor management, strategic sourcing, infrastructure procurement, or a related commercial role.
- A strong record of negotiating pricing and complex commercial agreements.
- Experience managing important external partners over the full relationship lifecycle.
- Excellent financial and analytical skills, including unit economics and scenario modeling.
- The ability to balance lower costs with reliability, flexibility, risk, and strategic value.
- Strong executive communication and relationship-building skills.
- Comfort working directly with founders, engineers, finance, security, and legal stakeholders.
- The ability to operate independently in a fast-moving, early-stage environment.
- Genuine interest in AI models and infrastructure economics.

Especially valuable
- Experience negotiating with model companies, inference platforms, cloud providers, GPU suppliers, or hyperscalers.
- Familiarity with token pricing, model APIs, AI workloads, and inference infrastructure.
- Experience with consumption-based or marketplace business models.
- Knowledge of volume commitments, reserved capacity, tiered pricing, rebates, and cloud contracts.
- Existing relationships within the AI provider ecosystem.
- Experience evaluating SLAs, data-retention policies, security requirements, and enterprise contracts.
- Experience reconciling complex usage-based provider invoices.
- Understanding of routing, provider redundancy, and supply concentration risk.

Who will thrive here

You’ll thrive in this role if you are an excellent negotiator who also understands that the lowest quoted price is not always the best agreement.

You can assess the complete relationship: price, model quality, latency, reliability, capacity, billing accuracy, data policies, contract flexibility, and long-term strategic value.

You don’t need to be an engineer, but you should be able to understand API-based products, token economics, provider performance, and the operational consequences of the terms you negotiate.

Why join Keak

- Own a function that directly influences Cheaper Inference’s pricing and profitability.
- Build relationships across the rapidly evolving AI model and infrastructure ecosystem.
- Work directly with the founders on strategically key agreements.
- Influence which models and providers become available to customers.
- Build Keak’s provider strategy and operating processes from the ground up.
- Help create a meaningful supply and economic advantage in AI inference.

📌 AI Provider Partnerships Lead - Cheaper Inference - chambord
🏢 Keak
📍 Chambord