Partner Director, SMB Partnerships

About the Team

OpenAI’s GTM Partnerships team builds a global partner ecosystem that accelerates adoption, distribution, and customer success in support of OpenAI’s mission. We work across Sales, Product, Operations, Legal, and Marketing to design scalable partner-led motions that expand reach, improve customer outcomes, and drive sustainable growth worldwide.

This team focuses on how OpenAI’s products are distributed and adopted through partners — from global systems integrators to high-velocity partners supporting product-led growth.

About the Role

We’re hiring a Partner Director, SMB Partnerships to help scale OpenAI’s global partner ecosystem focused on serving small and medium-sized businesses through ChatGPT for Business, OpenAI’s self-serve, product-led offering and other business focused products.

This role is central to expanding global distribution through partners who enable discovery, onboarding, deployment, and adoption at scale. You’ll work with a diverse set of partners — including agencies, consultancies, MSPs, and AI-native firms — to build repeatable, partner-led motions that align with a PLG model and drive broad market penetration.

The role blends strategy, execution, and operations, requiring someone who can design partner programs, enable partners to operate independently, and collaborate cross-functionally to ensure seamless customer experiences.

This position is based in San Francisco, CA, with in-office presence Monday through Wednesday and remote flexibility Thursday and Friday. Travel is expected ~25%.

In this role you will:

• Design and evolve partner programs that support global distribution of ChatGPT for Business to small and medium-sized customers.

• Recruit, onboard, and enable partners to drive customer acquisition, onboarding, and adoption through product-led motions.

• Develop scalable partner lifecycle frameworks across recruitment, activation, enablement, and growth.

• Create partner enablement programs, including training, certifications, playbooks, and deployment guidance aligned to self-serve and PLG workflows.

• Collaborate closely with Product, GTM Systems, RevOps, Legal, Finance, Marketing, and Support to ensure partner readiness, tooling, and operational alignment.

• Build joint go-to-market motions with partners, including referrals, co-selling, and partner-led activation strategies.

• Define and track partner performance metrics across activation, usage, retention, and expansion.

• Continuously refine partner strategy based on data, partner feedback, and evolving market needs.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• Bachelor’s degree in Business, Technology, or a related field; equivalent practical experience welcomed.

• 8–12+ years of experience in partnerships, channel, business development, or growth roles within SaaS or product-led organizations.

• Experience building or scaling partner-led distribution models, particularly in PLG or self-serve environments.

• Strong operational instincts with experience working across systems, processes, and cross-functional teams.

• Ability to operate with clarity and ownership in fast-moving, high-growth environments.

• Excellent communication, negotiation, and relationship-building skills.

• Global mindset and comfort working with partners across regions and business models.

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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