Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Partnerships roles sit at a pivotal point in the SaaS ecosystem because they shape distribution, integrations, and product surface area without owning a single roadmap. This Partner Manager position is notable for its focus on search and commerce collaborations, a category where platform reach, user intent, and monetisation mechanics intersect. The listing also signals a relatively lean partnerships function, suggesting the work spans both strategy and operational execution across major external counterparts.
For SaaS career development, the role offers durable exposure to how products scale through ecosystems rather than only direct sales or standalone feature delivery. Managing partner operating cadences, defining success metrics, and coordinating launches and renewals builds a toolkit that transfers across B2C and B2B SaaS, especially in companies where growth depends on embedded distribution. The cross functional nature of the work reinforces fluency with product, engineering, finance, and legal constraints that shape commercial outcomes.
This role tends to suit a generalist operator who enjoys switching between relationship building, analytical tracking, and structured internal coordination. It aligns well with professionals who want ownership over outcomes while working through influence, and who are comfortable navigating ambiguity across multiple stakeholders and priorities.
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 in this role is to maintain and scale partnerships spanning consumer products. You will build deep relationships, ensure we have the right strategic partners, lead cross-functional workstreams and advance OpenAI’s mission.
About the role
We are seeking a skilled generalist who can rapidly context switch but have a background working closely with product leaders and expertise in strategic deals. You’re able to drive work at high velocity and can motivate external and internal partners, including product, engineering, and operations. You operate with independence and focus, finding creative solutions to unlock growth and innovation.
In this role, you will:
Own and scale our most strategic search and commerce partnerships: Drive day-to-day partnership strategy and execution across priority partners, working closely with product, engineering, research, sales, finance, legal, and marketing to align roadmaps and deliver outcomes.
Support partnership deal execution: Support commercial negotiations from partner evaluation through launch, expansion, and renewal, including both product integrations and commercial terms.
Operate as a cross-functional driver: Coordinate internal teams and external partners to launch, manage, and optimize partnership initiatives end-to-end.
Serve as the internal advocate for partners, aligning product and cross-functional teams to partner goals, applying thoughtful pushback on roadmap tradeoffs, and driving accountability against agreed success metrics.
Run partner operating cadence: Establish and manage working rhythms with partners (business reviews, planning sessions, issue resolution), escalating and aligning with senior stakeholders as needed.
Track and communicate impact: Define success metrics, monitor performance (adoption, revenue, usage, satisfaction), and clearly communicate progress, risks, and opportunities to internal stakeholders.
Build strong partner relationships: Serve as a primary point of contact for partner counterparts, building trust and identifying new opportunities for collaboration and growth.
You might thrive in this role if you:
6+ years of experience in business development, product partnerships, or product within the technology industry.
Proven experience supporting or leading strategic partnerships, including technical/product integrations.
Strong cross-functional operator with experience working closely with product, engineering, legal, finance, and sales teams to execute complex initiatives.
Experience working on or alongside shopping, search, marketplace, content, or large-scale consumer platforms with a strong understanding of engagement dynamics.
Skilled relationship builder with clear, effective communication across both internal and partner organizations.
Self-directed and adaptable, comfortable operating in fast-moving environments with evolving priorities and partial ambiguity.
Past experience working at high growth companies is 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.
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