Partnerships Deal Lead - Search, Commerce

About the team
We are a small and fast-moving partnerships team that shapes and executes across high-impact collaborations and product partnerships. Your mission in this role is to identify, structure, and close strategic partnerships spanning products within search and commerce. You will help define where partnerships can create outsized product and business value, shape the right deal structures, lead cross-functional workstreams, and advance OpenAI’s mission by helping programmatically scale this work.

About the role
We are seeking a skilled generalist who can rapidly context switch but have a background working closely with product leaders and expertise in strategic deal-making. You’re able to drive work at high velocity and can motivate external and internal stakeholders, including product, engineering, finance, legal, and operations. You operate with independence and focus, finding creative solutions to unlock growth, get partnerships signed, and turn agreements into durable outcomes.

In this role, you will:

• Drive Search and Commerce deals: Identify, prioritize, and advance partnership opportunities across distribution, content, commerce, and data partners, working closely with product, engineering, research, sales, finance, legal, and marketing.

• Lead complex commercial structures: Structure and negotiate partnership agreements spanning product integrations, distribution, content access, commerce enablement, and customized commercial frameworks, managing the full lifecycle from sourcing and diligence through signing.

• Drive end-to-end deal execution: Own partner coordination, internal approvals, open items, and decision-making workstreams to move partnerships efficiently from thesis through close and launch.

• Shape joint product and go-to-market strategy: Collaborate closely with internal stakeholders to define scope, align incentives, navigate tradeoffs, and translate partnership ideas into executable launches.

• Operate as a cross-functional driver: Coordinate internal teams and external partners to launch priority partnerships end-to-end, unblock dependencies, and ensure strong execution post-signature.

• Track and communicate impact: Define success metrics, evaluate tradeoffs, and clearly communicate progress, risks, and expansion opportunities to internal stakeholders.

• Build senior partner relationships: Serve as a primary point of contact for partner counterparts, build trust with decision-makers, and create momentum through ambiguity and complex negotiations.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• 6+ years of experience in business development, product partnerships, corporate development, consulting, investment banking, or product within the technology industry.

• Strong experience structuring and negotiating complex deals that span product integrations, distribution partnerships, commercial frameworks, and long-term expansion paths.

• Strong cross-functional operator with experience working closely with product, engineering, legal, finance, and sales teams to execute complex initiatives.

• Experience working on or alongside search, commerce, marketplace, content, or large-scale consumer platforms with a strong understanding of ecosystem, user, and monetization dynamics.

• Skilled relationship builder with strong strategic judgment and clear, effective communication across senior internal and partner organizations.

• Self-directed and adaptable, comfortable operating in fast-moving environments with evolving priorities and partial ambiguity.

• Past experience working at high growth companies preferred.

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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