O

OpenAI

Builds AI models and the ChatGPT assistant

Partner Director - Mckinsey Alliance

Full-Time
$380k - $420k/yr
Expert
San Francisco, CA, USA
In Person
Sales & Account ManagementBusiness Development & Partnerships

About the job

Requirements
  • Partner, Senior Partner, Managing Director, or equivalent senior leadership experience at McKinsey, another leading strategy firm, or a top-tier technology or transformation organization.
  • A strong combination of technology fluency and commercial leadership across business development, enterprise transformation, industry advisory, go-to-market, or strategic alliances.
  • Proven ownership of a global, multi-year strategic partnership with executive accountability and measurable commercial and customer outcomes.
  • Demonstrated success shaping and closing high-stakes, board-level transformation opportunities and moving them from strategy through production deployment.
  • Experience designing and scaling operating models between senior, partner-led organizations, including governance, incentives, account planning, staffing, delivery handoffs, and escalation.
  • Credibility with senior leaders in strategy consulting and enterprise technology, with a practical understanding of partnership economics, regional structures, and decision-making networks.
  • The ability to influence Product, Research, Sales, Technical, Legal, Finance, Communications, and partner organizations without relying on direct authority.
  • Deep literacy in enterprise artificial intelligence, data, cloud, security, governance, and organizational transformation, with credibility among CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, CDOs, and other senior executives.
  • Experience working with data science, artificial intelligence engineering, or advanced analytics organizations such as QuantumBlack or comparable groups.
  • Industry expertise in at least one priority vertical, such as financial services, healthcare, pharmaceuticals and life sciences, retail and consumer, technology, industrials, or energy.
  • Experience building repeatable solutions or transformation plays from high-value strategic engagements.
  • A disciplined approach to portfolio management, including deciding when to invest, scale, redirect, or decline an opportunity.
Responsibilities
  • Own the global McKinsey relationship, including alliance strategy, pipeline growth, enterprise impact, deployment scale, and long-term expansion across priority industries.
  • Define and run the partnership’s operating model across executive governance, joint planning, regional execution, opportunity management, resource allocation, and escalation.
  • Serve as OpenAI’s senior executive counterpart to McKinsey’s global leadership and relevant industry, functional, technology, and regional leaders.
  • Develop a differentiated alliance strategy that combines McKinsey’s strategy, industry expertise, transformation capabilities, and executive relationships with OpenAI’s research, models, products, and technical expertise.
  • Build a deep working relationship with QuantumBlack and other McKinsey technology and artificial intelligence teams to develop repeatable solutions and move customer programs from strategy and experimentation into production.
  • Set joint priorities, establish clear ownership, resolve escalations, and coordinate execution across global and regional teams.
  • Shape and lead the co-selling of complex, CxO- and board-level enterprise artificial intelligence transformation opportunities.
  • Engage directly with enterprise executives alongside McKinsey leaders to frame artificial intelligence strategy, operating models, use-case portfolios, governance, adoption plans, organizational change, and value realization.
  • Identify priority industries, transformation plays, and lighthouse accounts where the partnership can create differentiated and repeatable customer value.
  • Coordinate OpenAI stakeholders across Product, Research, Sales, Solutions Architecture, Technical Success, Legal, Finance, Communications, and Operations to support strategic pursuits and deployments.
  • Establish clear rules of engagement and guardrails for intellectual property, solution quality, safety, delivery, commercial ownership, and customer accountability.
  • Build McKinsey’s capability to position, design, and deliver solutions powered by OpenAI through executive alignment, technical enablement, solution patterns, readiness programs, and disciplined delivery handoffs.
  • Develop joint assets and offerings that can scale beyond individual engagements while maintaining the rigor required for highly strategic customers.
  • Allocate OpenAI resources based on strategic value, revenue potential, customer impact, repeatability, delivery readiness, and partner performance.
  • Build and lead a dedicated alliance pod over time, spanning partner management, technical leadership, enablement, and operations.
  • Establish durable reporting, metrics, and operating cadences covering pipeline, conversion, production adoption, customer outcomes, partner readiness, delivery quality, and return on OpenAI investment.
Desired Qualifications
  • Preferably, experience with private-equity value creation, portfolio transformation, capability building, or large-scale operating-model change.

About the company

OpenAI researches and builds artificial intelligence models and turns them into products for people, developers, and businesses, with a stated mission of making sure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. Its launch of ChatGPT in 2022 brought generative AI into everyday use. People use ChatGPT to ask questions, write, code, and analyze files, developers build OpenAI's models into their own apps through its API, and its Codex agent works through coding tasks on its own. OpenAI earns money from ChatGPT subscriptions, business plans, and API usage. Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and others co-founded it in 2015; it is based in San Francisco and overseen by a nonprofit, the OpenAI Foundation.

Company Size

1,001-5,000

Company Stage

Late Stage VC

Total Funding

$226.5B

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Founded

2015

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Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • Sales are compounding: OpenAI's yearly revenue pace doubled from $24 billion in March 2026 to nearly $50 billion in September.
  • Equity turns into cash regularly: staff sold $7 billion of shares in August 2026, after $6.6 billion in October 2025.
  • Room to grow: OpenAI plans to nearly double staff to 8,000 by year-end and listed 816 openings in October 2026.

What critics are saying

  • Its chief rival pulled ahead: Claude maker Anthropic's $965 billion valuation in May 2026 topped OpenAI's $852 billion.
  • Profits are years away: OpenAI's own forecast, reported in September 2026, shows $278 billion of cash burn through 2030.
  • Expect leadership churn: 15 senior leaders, including the revenue and applications chiefs, left OpenAI between January and September 2026.

What makes OpenAI unique

  • A nonprofit is in charge: the OpenAI Foundation appoints OpenAI's whole board and held a 26% stake in October 2025.
  • ChatGPT reaches about one in seven people on Earth: 1.2 billion used it each week as of September 2026.
  • Microsoft is a major part-owner: it held about 27% in October 2025 and licenses OpenAI's models through 2032.

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Benefits

Health insurance

Dental and vision insurance

Flexible spending account for healthcare and dependent care

Mental healthcare service

Fertility treatment coverage

401(k) with generous matching

20-week paid parental leave

Life insurance (complimentary)

AD&D insurance (complimentary)

Short-term/long-term disability insurance (complimentary)

Optional buy-up life insurance

Flexible work hours and unlimited paid time off (we encourage 4+ weeks per year)

Annual learning & development stipend

Regular team happy hours and outings

Daily catered lunch and dinner

Travel to domestic conferences

Growth & Insights and Company News

Headcount

6 month growth

6%

1 year growth

1%

2 year growth

2%
Yahoo Finance
Oct 15th, 2026
BofA survey: ChatGPT tops Google Search as top pick for next-year ad budget growth, 26% to 19%

A Bank of America (BofA) survey of 117 advertisers and agencies suggests ChatGPT is starting to compete with Google for future ad budgets. In the poll, 26% named ChatGPT as the platform likely to gain the most ad spending over the next 12 months, ahead of Google Search at 19% and YouTube at 11%. Google still leads on current spending. Search was picked by 30% as the platform with the biggest rise in spend, and 33% said it was where AI was lifting ad returns fastest. Alphabet's Google Search and other revenue rose 17% to $63.27 billion in the second quarter. OpenAI said ChatGPT Ads passed $1 billion in annualised revenue run rate less than 200 days after launch. In the survey, 28% of respondents already advertise on ChatGPT, and 43% plan to start within 12 months.

Associated Press
Oct 14th, 2026
Infometry partners with OpenAI to bring advanced reasoning to enterprise data in Conversa

Infometry, a data analytics and AI company based in Silicon Valley, has partnered with OpenAI to bring OpenAI's models to its INFOFISCUS Conversa platform. The models are available now. Customers can connect their own OpenAI API credentials and use the models alongside other large and small language models. They can pick a model for each task based on reasoning complexity, performance, governance, and cost. Conversa queries data across enterprise and cloud platforms without copying it into a separate repository. Users can run root-cause analysis on changes in revenue, inventory, or forecasts, and ask follow-up questions in the same context. Infometry plans to deepen the integration as the partnership evolves.

Yahoo Finance
Oct 14th, 2026
OpenAI CFO warns on cheap Chinese AI models as revenue nears $50B

OpenAI chief financial officer Sarah Friar has warned businesses against relying on cheaper Chinese AI models, saying some open-source systems can create cybersecurity risks for corporate networks. Speaking to Bloomberg Television, she said companies should favour Western AI software when protecting sensitive information. Anthropic executive Guillaume Princen made a similar point, noting that users can alter the code of open models. A Wharton School study found managers are split on who is responsible when workplace AI makes a serious error. In one example, a retail worker misconfigured a bot, which sent erroneous refund notices to 18,000 customers within hours. Friar added that US AI companies cannot afford to slow down. She said OpenAI reached nearly $50 billion in annualised revenue in the third quarter and expects roughly $70 billion by year-end.

Bloomberg
Oct 14th, 2026
OpenAI hires ex-xAI executive Uday Ruddarraju to lead data centre and compute units

OpenAI has named Uday Ruddarraju, a former xAI executive, to lead its infrastructure and compute businesses. The appointment is the latest leadership change among OpenAI's teams focused on expanding data center capacity.

Fox Business
Oct 13th, 2026
Saudi OpenAI engineer charged over hidden recording device in executive conference room

A Saudi national working as an OpenAI engineer has been arrested for allegedly planting a covert recording device in an executive conference room at the company's San Francisco office, federal authorities announced Tuesday. Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, was arrested October 9 and charged with using or attempting to use a device to intercept oral communications. OpenAI found the encrypted device on September 30, plugged into a television's USB port and hidden in toilet paper. The room was used for highly confidential talks on research and product plans. Prosecutors said security footage showed Alfozan near the room several times without authorisation. A second device was later found in his bag. OpenAI said it found no sign that model weights, source code, or customer data were accessed. Alfozan has been fired. If convicted, he faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.