Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Alliance leadership has become a core SaaS growth lever as enterprise buyers increasingly adopt new platforms through trusted services partners. This Partner Director role sits at that intersection, owning a single global relationship and translating executive alignment into repeatable commercial outcomes. The remit signals a mature go to market motion where partner ecosystems, governance, and co sell execution matter as much as product capability, particularly in enterprise AI adoption.
For a SaaS career, the work builds durable operating skills that travel across categories: designing joint plans, setting metrics, running global cadences, and coordinating internal stakeholders across product, legal, communications, and sales. It also offers sustained exposure to complex enterprise cycles where value realization, risk guardrails, and multi region consistency determine whether partnerships scale beyond a few lighthouse wins.
This role tends to suit senior operators who prefer accountability over advisory, and who can move between boardroom conversations and day to day execution without losing precision. It will appeal to professionals who enjoy ambiguity in partner led growth, can influence without direct authority, and want their impact measured through partner health, pipeline quality, and long term expansion rather than isolated deals.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
About the Team
OpenAI’s GTM Partnerships team builds a strategic, global partner ecosystem designed to accelerate customer success, enable enterprise AI adoption, and drive durable growth in support of OpenAI’s mission toward AGI. We work closely across product, research, sales, legal, and communications teams to ensure a cohesive strategy and disciplined execution with our most strategic partners.
About the Role
We are hiring a Global Partner Director, McKinsey Alliance to lead and scale OpenAI’s relationship with McKinsey & Company. This role serves as the single accountable executive owner of the McKinsey relationship globally. You will be responsible for defining strategic direction, establishing a durable operating model, and converting alignment into scaled commercial and transformational outcomes across regions and industries. The role carries full responsibility for the health, performance, and long-term expansion of the partnership and requires senior executive presence, judgment, and accountability.
In this role, you will:
Own the global McKinsey relationship, including pipeline growth, enterprise impact, and long-term expansion across priority industries.
Define and run OpenAI’s operating model for the McKinsey partnership, spanning governance, joint planning, and execution cadence across regions.
Serve as OpenAI’s senior executive counterpart to McKinsey’s global leadership, including relevant practice leadership and QuantumBlack / McKinsey technology leaders.
Set joint priorities, resolve escalations, and ensure coordinated execution across global and regional teams.
Shape and lead co-selling of complex, CxO-level enterprise AI transformation opportunities.
Engage directly with enterprise executives (CEO, CDO, CIO, CTO, Board) alongside McKinsey partners to frame AI strategy, operating models, and value realization.
Coordinate internal OpenAI stakeholders (product, research, GTM, legal, communications) to support McKinsey-led strategic engagements and lighthouse opportunities.
Establish and enforce clear IP, quality, and conflict-of-interest guardrails across joint engagements and any co-developed assets.
Define vertical strategy and lighthouse account selection in partnership with McKinsey across priority industries.
Build and lead OpenAI’s dedicated McKinsey alliance pod over time, spanning partner management, technical leadership, enablement, and operations.
Establish durable reporting, metrics, and operating cadence to ensure consistent alliance performance and continuous improvement.
You might thrive in this role if you have:
Associate Partner / Principal or Partner-level experience at an MBB firm preferred, or equivalent senior leadership experience in a top-tier strategy and transformation organization.
A strong combination of technology fluency and commercial leadership, ideally across business development, industry advisory, or alliances/partnership roles.
Proven ownership of global, multi-year strategic partnerships with executive accountability and measurable outcomes.
Demonstrated success shaping and closing high-stakes, board-level enterprise transformation opportunities.
Ability to design and scale joint operating models between senior, partner-led organizations.
Strong executive presence with comfort operating under ambiguity, complexity, and accountability.
Ability to influence cross-functionally across product, research, sales, legal, communications, and partner organizations.
Industry expertise in at least one of the following verticals: Financial Services; Pharma & Life Sciences; Healthcare; Retail.
Deep literacy in enterprise AI, data, and cloud transformation, with credibility among CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, and Chief Digital Officers.
About OpenAI
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.
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.
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