ISV Partnerships Lead

About the Team

We are a small and fast-moving partnerships team that shapes and executes OpenAI’s most important collaborations. Your mission is to build and lead our business with independent software vendors, from native AI companies building in our programs to technology companies taking new products to market with OpenAI’s models and products. You will help partners build, launch, and grow differentiated products while working closely with our sales and product organizations.

About the Role

You are a senior partnerships leader with strong judgment, high ownership, and a track record of building consequential ISV relationships. You can establish durable executive partnerships, lead complex product and commercial negotiations, and move fluently from market strategy to integration, launch, adoption, and growth. You are highly commercial, technically fluent, and comfortable operating where there is no playbook.

In this role, you will:

• Define OpenAI’s ISV partnership strategy, priorities, segmentation, and business goals.
• Recruit and manage a portfolio of high-impact software partners across horizontal and vertical applications.
• Structure and negotiate partnerships spanning product integration, model adoption, commercial terms, distribution, and joint go-to-market.
• Develop joint business plans and executive governance with strategic partners.
• Help partners move from initial build to launch, customer adoption, expansion, and scaled consumption.
• Create repeatable co-build, co-sell, co-market, and marketplace motions.
• Serve as the voice of ISVs internally, shaping product requirements, developer experience, economics, and partner programs.
• Track partner pipeline, launches, adoption, consumption, customer impact, and ecosystem growth.
• Establish the team structure and operating model needed to scale the ISV business.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• 12+ years of experience in technology partnerships, business development, platform ecosystems, or enterprise software.
• Proven experience leading strategic ISV relationships and negotiating complex product and commercial partnerships.
• Strong understanding of AI platforms, SaaS business models, cloud marketplaces, and enterprise go-to-market.
• Demonstrated ability to manage a portfolio while personally driving the highest-impact partnerships.
• Credibility with partner executives and with product, engineering, sales, finance, legal, and marketing teams.
• Strong strategic and commercial judgment, technical fluency, and comfort operating through ambiguity.
• Outstanding communication, executive presence, and cross-functional leadership in a fast-moving technology company.

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.

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.