Lead, Client Partnerships- Sureel

Job description

### **A little bit about our team** Sureel AI is building the standards and infrastructure for AI rights, licensing, attribution, protection, and intelligence, starting in music and expanding across media. We are building the infrastructure that enables creators and rights holders to control how their work is used by AI, protect their rights, understand its use and value, and participate in new AI licensing models. We also provide AI companies and digital platforms with the systems they need to access rights, permissions, attribution, guardrails, reporting, and licensing infrastructure programmatically. Acquired by Warner Music Group, Sureel operates as an independent, federated company, combining startup speed with the reach of a global music company. Our clients and partners are at the center of what we do. As Director, Client Relations, you'll own those relationships after the handoff from Business Development, working closely with senior leadership, cross-functional teams, and partners across the music, technology, and legal worlds. Your work will play a direct role in whether the industry adopts Sureel as infrastructure for managing and executing AI rights strategies at scale. ### **Your role** You will lead Sureel's client and partnership function and report to the two Co-Presidents. You'll own senior rights-holder relationships from commercial handoff through pilot, onboarding, adoption, and expansion, while working closely with Business Development & Licensing when commercial terms or new agreements are required. You'll bring the rights-holder perspective into Sureel. You will work closely with partners, Product, Engineering, AI, and leadership to understand how rights-holders work today, where the gaps are, and what Sureel needs to build to support them. A core part of the role will be understanding what drives adoption across our rights-holder network and using that insight to shape how Sureel works with partners, how the product evolves, and where the company should focus. You'll also help identify opportunities for broader industry collaboration, shared frameworks, and approaches that can accelerate adoption across the market. This role combines senior relationship management with industry expertise, product input, and the opportunity to help define how Sureel works with the market as the company grows. ### What you'll do: - **Own Sureel's most important rights-holder relationships**, building trust with senior leaders and understanding their priorities, business models, and AI rights strategies. - **Lead partners through pilots and implementations**, coordinating testing, data reviews, product feedback, onboarding, and decision-making while keeping the relationship moving forward. - **Understand how rights-holders use Sureel**, where they see value, where they encounter friction, and what would make the platform more useful to them. - **Bring partner needs into product development**, translating rights-holder requirements and feedback into clear input for Product, Engineering, and AI. - **Translate Sureel's attribution and payout models for partners**, helping rights-holders understand what the data means and how it applies to their business. - **Identify patterns across partner conversations**, distinguishing individual requests from broader needs that should influence product, commercial strategy, or industry direction. - **Help shape how Sureel works with rights-holders at scale**, developing the approaches, processes, and tools needed as the partner network grows. - **Own the quality of partner-facing data and reporting**, ensuring attribution data and reports are accurate, consistent, and trusted. - **Identify opportunities to deepen relationships**, including new use cases, broader organizational or catalog participation, and increased platform adoption. - **Represent Sureel in senior partner meetings and industry settings**, including with Warner Music Group counterparts. - **Prepare thoroughly for important partner conversations**, bringing the right context, history, and background so discussions can move forward. - **Work closely with leadership on client strategy**, helping determine where Sureel should focus its time and attention across the partner network. - **Help shape the client function as Sureel grows**, including where additional resources, processes, or capabilities are needed. ### Who you are: - You have deep experience in **music rights, metadata, and/or collective management**. You understand splits, share pictures, the difference between composition and recording rights, and how CMOs and publishers pay their members. - You've built and managed senior relationships with rights-holders, clients, partners, or other industry stakeholders and know how to develop those relationships over time. - You understand how to turn what you learn from clients into useful input for product, business, and commercial decisions. - You're comfortable with data and technical detail. You can read a dataset, question the numbers, and explain them clearly to a non-technical partner. - You build trust quickly and can represent leadership, make judgment calls, and know when something needs their attention. - You communicate clearly and can stay calm in a fast-moving environment. - You can distinguish between an individual client's request and a broader market signal that should influence product, commercial strategy, or industry direction. - You are interested in the music industry and enjoy working in a small, collaborative, startup-paced team. ### We'd love it if you also had: - Experience working with artists, labels, publishers, CMOs/PROs, music-tech companies, metadata companies, or as a senior consultant to them. - Experience across client/QA, business operations, client relations, or strategic partnerships. - Involvement in industry metadata or rights standards initiatives. - Experience working directly with C-level executives on client strategy and translating senior conversations into action. - Curiosity about the music and entertainment landscape and AI's impact on creators. - Experience with Google Workspace, CRM and calendar tools, and expense systems such as Concur.