Partnerships Operations Lead, OAI for Government

The posting, as OpenAI wrote it

About the team
OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. OpenAI for Government helps public-sector institutions use advanced AI responsibly to improve services and advance critical missions. The Partnerships team builds the external ecosystem and internal operating mechanisms required to deliver that work at scale.

Role Summary

We are seeking a Partnerships Operations Lead to build and run the operating foundation for OpenAI for Government’s Partnerships team.

This person will serve as the operational connective tissue across the partner team, working closely with Account Directors, Solutions Architects, Revenue Operations, Deal Desk, and other cross-functional stakeholders to move opportunities from initial engagement through agreement and execution.

They will help ensure a smooth handoff to Technical Success across accounts by establishing clear readiness criteria, capturing the right commercial and customer context, and aligning teams on partner roles, commitments, dependencies, and success outcomes.

The ideal candidate is a true utility player who combines the relationship instincts of a growth oriented builder with the rigor of an exceptional business operator. They thrive in ambiguity, create processes that do not yet exist, and move fluidly between deal execution, workflow design, analysis, and cross-functional coordination.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end operating cadence for partner-sourced and partner-influenced opportunities, from intake and qualification through approvals, contracting, launch, and expansion.
• Build and continuously improve operating processes, standard procedures, stage gates, decision rights, and service expectations that make partner execution faster and more predictable.
• Operationalize new and existing government partner motions—including cloud providers, resellers, and sell-through models—by translating requirements that differ from standard commercial motions into clear workflows, enablement, decision rights, and cross-functional handoffs.
• Coordinate deal execution across Account Directors, Revenue Operations, Deal Desk, Legal, Finance, Security and Compliance, Product, Technical Success, and partner teams, ensuring every action has a clear owner and timeline.
• Establish a consistent handoff from commercial teams to Technical Success by standardizing readiness criteria, account context, use cases, partner responsibilities, commitments, dependencies, and success plans.
• Unblock complex deals by surfacing issues early, driving approvals and escalations, managing exceptions, and closing gaps between functions.
• Maintain the operational source of truth for contract milestones, partner launches, handoff readiness, dependencies, and risks, with a high bar for process and data quality; coordinate with Revenue Operations to ensure partner context is reflected in pipeline and CRM data.
• Own the government-partner operatin

[…]
please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf.

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 https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA. 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 https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241.

OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf

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.