Partnerships Lead, Southern Europe
AI research and deployment company building and deploying frontier AI products, including ChatGPT, Codex, and its API platform.
Projects
About OpenAI
OpenAI’s mission is to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. It consists of the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation and OpenAI Group, a public benefit corporation governed by the Foundation.
Skills
Candidate Availability
Required and preferred rules are kept separate and reflect the wording in the original posting.
About the Role
You will lead the partner sales and development team for Southern EMEA, reporting to the Head of GTM Partnerships, Europe. You will own the regional partner business, translate broader partnership priorities into a focused regional plan, and coach your team to engage the right partners. You will build relationships with partner field leaders, stay hands-on in priority pursuits, and work with technical and delivery teams to turn commercial commitments into sustained customer value.
Requirements
- Significant experience in enterprise sales, partner sales, strategic alliances, or business development within cloud, AI, SaaS, or enterprise technology
- Track record of owning regional or segment-level business outcomes and delivering pipeline, revenue, and growth through partners
- Direct people management experience including hiring, coaching, performance management, and team development
- Deep familiarity with cloud providers, global systems integrators, consulting firms, or technology partner ecosystems
- Experience leading complex partnerships or customer engagements from discovery to commercial execution and expansion
- Strong enterprise sales fundamentals including account planning, qualification, stakeholder mapping, negotiation, pipeline management, and forecasting
- Ability to earn trust and resolve disagreements in a matrixed organization
- Technical-commercial fluency
- Strong operational judgment and a builder mindset
- Clear communication and executive presence
- Preferred: experience managing geographically distributed teams
- Preferred: experience building or scaling a regional partner sales or co-sell business at a high-growth technology company
- Preferred: familiarity with AI platforms, cloud architectures, cloud marketplaces, and enterprise procurement models
Responsibilities
- Own the partner sales and development plan for Southern Europe
- Drive regional commercial outcomes across partner-sourced and partner-attached pipeline, bookings, production adoption, and expansion
- Identify and develop new partner-led opportunities
- Lead account mapping and joint account planning with sellers and partner teams
- Orchestrate complex co-sell pursuits
- Build trusted relationships with regional partner executives and field leaders
- Partner with Solutions Engineering, Customer Success, Product, and partner delivery teams on technical and implementation dependencies
- Create repeatable field engagement models, partner enablement, sales plays, and escalation paths
- Establish pipeline reviews, forecasting, business reviews, and performance reporting
- Navigate complex stakeholder relationships across Legal, Security, Finance, and other teams
- Hire, manage, coach, and develop a high-performing regional team
