Partner Manager, Cloud Service Provider Partnerships

OpenAI

↗

Research Services 👥 201 employees 📍 San Francisco, CA, US Est. 2015

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with…

Job Overview

We are a small and fast-moving partnerships team that shapes and executes all aspects of collaboration with the largest partners. Your mission is to build, scale, and manage strategic partnerships to help advance OpenAI’s priorities. You will help manage and execute partnerships that accelerate adoption, unlock new capabilities, and extend OpenAI’s platform across key industries and use cases.

About the Role

In this role, you will manage OpenAI’s relationships with major cloud service providers (CSPs) to help scale our models' availability and use. These partnerships have huge customer and business impact: broader model access, faster launches, clearer buying paths, and stronger adoption by enterprises and developers.

You’ll build and lead the partnerships day to day: ensuring strong delivery with Research, Product, Engineering, Marketing and GTM; aligning internal executives and cross-functional leaders; and owning prominent external relationships. Success in this role means owning important business outcomes by closing high-quality partnerships and turning agreements into reliable launches, strong user experiences, and sustained impact.

You are a product-focused, high judgment senior operator with a record of getting complex partnerships over the line. You know how cloud providers work, how their sales and marketplace channels reach customers, and how technical and commercial decisions affect adoption. You move fast, can context-switch easily, and can motivate both external executives and internal teams. You set clear priorities, run tight execution, and deliver results.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead OpenAI’s work with major cloud providers, setting priorities with product, engineering, sales, finance, legal, policy, and marketing and driving the work to measurable results.


• Own the business plan for each cloud provider relationship: where we should show up, which customers and use cases matter most, and how the partnership should grow usage, revenue, and reach.


• Make it easier for customers to use OpenAI models through their cloud provider by coordinating work across APIs, model serving, security, compliance, identity, billing, reliability, and support.


• Build practical sales and launch plans with cloud providers, including marketplace listings, private offers, field training, customer targets, joint marketing, and clear paths for teams to work together.


• Bring customer and partner feedback back to OpenAI so product, engineering, and leadership understand what is needed to make cloud distribution successful.


• Run senior partner meetings and operating reviews, including roadmap reviews, business updates, joint planning, escalations, and follow-through on decisions.


• Build simple playbooks and metrics that help OpenAI manage cloud partnerships well as the work scales.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience in business development, partnerships, product, sales strategy, or similar roles in cloud infrastructure, AI platforms, developer platforms, or enterprise software.


• Experience owning important relationships with major cloud providers, cloud marketplaces, platform partners, or other complex enterprise technology partners.


• Clear understanding of how cloud providers sell and operate, including marketplaces, private offers, consumption-based revenue, sales incentives, partner programs, cloud commitments, and enterprise procurement.


• Enough technical fluency to work credibly with product and engineering teams on APIs, model serving, security, compliance, identity, networking, reliability, and support.


• Strong cross-functional leadership; able to translate between executives, product and engineering teams, enterprise sales, legal, finance, policy, marketing, and partner teams.


• Strong commercial judgment and comfort making decisions with incomplete information.


• Excellent communication and relationship-building skills, with the presence to work with senior leaders inside OpenAI and at cloud providers