Partner Sales and Development Leader (AI)

Location: London, UK; hybrid

Company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company developing and safely deploying general-purpose artificial intelligence products.

What you will do

• Own the Southern Europe partner sales and development plan, including team coverage, target accounts, partner priorities, sales plays, and execution milestones.
• Drive partner-sourced and partner-attached pipeline, bookings, production adoption, expansion, and regional business performance.
• Identify partner-led opportunities, establish executive sponsorship, and lead opportunities from engagement through joint execution.
• Lead account mapping, joint account planning, and complex co-sell pursuits with OpenAI sellers, partner teams, technical stakeholders, and services organizations.
• Coordinate with Solutions Engineering, Customer Success, Product, Legal, Security, Finance, and partner delivery teams to resolve implementation and commercial dependencies.
• Hire, manage, coach, and develop the regional partner sales and development team while establishing pipeline reviews, forecasting, reporting, and performance management.

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 outcomes and delivering measurable pipeline, revenue, and customer 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 and their field organizations.
• Experience leading complex partnerships or customer engagements from discovery and qualification through commercial execution, launch, adoption, and expansion.
• Strong enterprise sales fundamentals, including account planning, opportunity qualification, stakeholder mapping, negotiation, pipeline management, and forecasting.
• Ability to build trust with Sales leaders, partner executives, technical teams, and peers and resolve disagreements in a matrixed organization.
• Technical-commercial fluency, including understanding customer use cases, translating partner needs into requirements, and engaging technical teams on implementation tradeoffs.
• Strong operational judgment, builder mindset, clear communication, executive presence, self-awareness, and collaborative problem-solving.

Nice to have

• Experience managing geographically distributed teams and aligning account or territory coverage across a region.
• Experience building or scaling a regional partner sales or co-sell business at a high-growth technology company.
• Experience aligning sales and partner delivery organizations for enterprise implementations and sustained production adoption.
• Familiarity with AI platforms, modern cloud architectures, cloud marketplaces, and enterprise procurement models.

Culture & Benefits

• Work across Sales, Solutions Engineering, Customer Success, Product, Marketing, Operations, Legal, Security, Finance, and partner organizations.
• Build a culture of accountability, collaboration, customer focus, feedback, and career development.
• OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer committed to reasonable accommodations and consideration of qualified applicants under applicable law.
• Background checks are administered in accordance with applicable law.