Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Partner Manager role sits at a key SaaS distribution layer where platform adoption is shaped less by direct sales and more by cloud ecosystems, marketplaces, and procurement paths. Working with major cloud service providers puts partnerships at the center of how an AI platform becomes consumable inside enterprise environments, from billing and identity to reliability and launch mechanics. It is a clear example of SaaS scaling through channels that are simultaneously technical and commercial.
For a SaaS career, the durable value here is learning how to turn a signed agreement into repeatable go to market execution. The remit touches operating rhythms that recur across mature SaaS companies: cross functional prioritisation with Product and Engineering, launch readiness, partner feedback loops, and measurement of adoption. Experience building playbooks and metrics for partner operations also translates well to other platform and marketplace led SaaS models.
This role suits a senior operator who prefers ambiguous, multi stakeholder work where progress depends on alignment as much as negotiation. It will fit someone comfortable translating between technical constraints and commercial outcomes, and who enjoys owning external executive relationships while driving internal follow through across multiple teams.
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
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, and Engineering, and coordinating with GTM and Marketing where needed for launch readiness; aligning internal executives and cross-functional leaders; and owning prominent external relationships. Success in this role means contributing to important business outcomes by 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 understand how cloud providers work, including the product, marketplace, procurement, and launch paths that shape customer 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:
Alongside GTM and Product, lead OpenAI’s work with major cloud providers, helping inform product, engineering, and launch priorities with cross-functional partners and driving the work to measurable results.
Shape the partnership operating plan for assigned cloud provider relationship: product priorities, roadmap alignment, launch milestones, partner dependencies, customer feedback loops & measures of adoption and impact.
Partner closely with GTM leadership, supporting business targets and overall plan.
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.
Drive launch readiness with cloud providers, ensuring cross-functional execution and engagement across Product, Eng. and GTM workstreams.
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, launch readiness, business updates, 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 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, legal, finance, policy, partner teams, and GTM stakeholders involved in launch execution.
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.
Experience working inside or closely with a major cloud provider, AI infrastructure company, developer platform, or high-growth enterprise technology company is strongly preferred.
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.
To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.
We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.
OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy
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.
