Partnership Director Jobs in California (NOW HIRING)

OpenAI's GTM Partnerships team builds a strategic, global partner ecosystem that accelerates customer success, enables enterprise AI adoption, and drives durable growth in support of OpenAI's mission.

Cloud partners are central to how customers discover, purchase, deploy, and scale OpenAI solutions. We work across cloud providers and their field, product, marketplace, technical, and partner organizations to reduce friction for customers and create repeatable paths from initial interest to production impact.

The team collaborates closely with Sales, Technical Success, Product, Engineering, Finance, Legal, Security, Marketing, Operations, and Customer Success to turn strategic cloud relationships into measurable customer and commercial outcomes.

We are hiring a Partner Director, GTM Cloud Partnerships to shape and execute OpenAI's go-to-market strategy with strategic cloud partners.

You will own senior relationships across a portfolio of cloud providers and develop joint business plans that expand customer access to OpenAI's products, generate partner-sourced opportunities, and accelerate enterprise adoption. You will translate company-level partnerships into practical field motions spanning account planning, co-selling, cloud marketplaces, customer procurement, technical enablement, solution development, and executive engagement.

This is a highly strategic and hands-on role. Success requires executive presence, strong commercial judgment, cloud ecosystem expertise, and the operating discipline to coordinate complex initiatives across multiple partners, regions, and internal teams. The ideal candidate can move fluidly between long-term strategy and the detailed execution required to deliver measurable results.

This role is based in San Francisco. We use a hybrid work model of three days in the office per week.

• Own the strategic and commercial relationships with a top global cloud partner, establishing strong alignment with their executive, sales, product, marketplace, technical, and partner organizations.


• Develop and execute joint business plans that increase customer adoption, partner-sourced pipeline, marketplace transactions, and revenue.


• Translate strategic agreements into repeatable go-to-market programs, clear field engagement models, and measurable operating priorities.


• Build scalable co-sell motions with OpenAI and partner sales teams, including account mapping, joint account planning, opportunity identification, executive engagement, and deal progression.


• Create pathways that allow customers to purchase and deploy OpenAI solutions through their existing cloud relationships, commitments, procurement processes, and governance frameworks.


• Work with cloud partners and internal teams to develop joint customer propositions, sales plays, reference architectures, technical patterns, and industry-specific solutions.


• Establish operating cadences for priority partnerships, including executive business reviews, pipeline inspections, forecasting, milestone tracking, performance reporting, and escalation management.


• Partner with Sales and Technical Success to identify, shape, and accelerate strategic enterprise opportunities involving cloud infrastructure, marketplaces, and AI transformation initiatives.


• Coordinate with Product, Engineering, Finance, Legal, Security, and Operations to resolve blockers and improve the end-to-end partner and customer experience.


• Drive partner enablement across OpenAI products, use cases, technical capabilities, customer qualification, security, provisioning, and deployment best practices.


• Collaborate with Partner Marketing on launches, campaigns, customer stories, field communications, and market-facing events.


• Gather structured feedback from cloud partners and customers and translate it into recommendations for OpenAI's product, commercial, and go-to-market teams.


• Define scalable playbooks, governance models, and prioritization frameworks that strengthen OpenAI's global cloud partnership practice.


• Represent OpenAI in executive meetings, customer engagements, strategic planning sessions, and industry events.

• 10+ years of experience in cloud partnerships, strategic alliances, ecosystem sales, business development, or enterprise sales within cloud, SaaS, AI, or platform businesses.


• Significant experience developing go-to-market partnerships with major cloud providers and navigating their sales, product, marketplace, technical, and partner organizations.


• A demonstrated track record of producing measurable pipeline, revenue, customer adoption, or marketplace outcomes through strategic partnerships.


• Experience translating complex global agreements into practical field motions, operating plans, and repeatable customer engagement models.


• Strong familiarity with cloud marketplaces, co-sell programs, committed-spend models, partner attribution, and cloud-based enterprise procurement.


• Experience supporting complex enterprise opportunities involving AI transformation, cloud modernization, data platforms, or large-scale technical deployments.


• The ability to build trusted relationships with senior executives while remaining close to the operational details that determine whether a partnership succeeds.


• Strong commercial judgment and the ability to prioritize investments across partners, regions, use cases, and customer segments.


• Technical fluency sufficient to engage credibly with cloud architects, product leaders, engineering teams, and technical decision-makers.


• Excellent program-management skills and experience coordinating multiple high-priority workstreams across highly matrixed organizations.


• The ability to influence without formal authority, manage escalations constructively, and create urgency across internal and external teams.


• Experience operating in an early-stage or high-growth environment where strategies, processes, and playbooks are still being built.


• Excellent written, verbal, negotiation, and executive-presentation skills.

• Are a builder who can create structure in an ambiguous and rapidly evolving partnership landscape.


• Combine a strategic perspective with a strong bias toward execution and measurable business outcomes.


• Understand how cloud providers operate— from corporate strategy and product partnerships to marketplaces and field-level co-selling.


• Build trust quickly with partners, customers, and internal stakeholders.


• Learn technical concepts quickly and translate them into clear customer and commercial value.


• Are energized by the opportunity to define how OpenAI works with the global cloud ecosystem to bring advanced AI into production for more organizations.

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. For additional information, please see OpenAI's affirmative action and equal employment opportunity policy statement https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241.

OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf

At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.