---
title: 'Partner Director, McKinsey Alliance at OpenAI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/partner-director-mckinsey-alliance-openai-san-francisco-cvbss1h192c7'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-05'
---

# Partner Director, McKinsey Alliance at OpenAI

- **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai)
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $380k–$420k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-08-12
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-05
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/28c96920-a412-47c0-88f8-342790d779ff

## Job description

## About the Team

OpenAI’s GTM Partnerships team builds a strategic, global partner ecosystem designed to accelerate customer success, enable enterprise AI adoption, and drive durable growth in support of OpenAI’s mission. We work closely across Product, Research, Sales, Legal, Communications, and regional leadership to ensure a cohesive strategy and disciplined execution with our most strategic partners.

## About the Role

We are hiring a Partner Director, Global McKinsey Alliance to lead and scale OpenAI’s relationship with McKinsey & Company. This role will serve as the single accountable executive owner of the alliance globally. You will define the partnership strategy and operating model, translating executive alignment into scaled commercial and transformation outcomes across regions and industries. You will work closely with McKinsey’s global leadership, industry and functional practices, and technology organizations—including QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey—to develop differentiated enterprise AI offerings, pursue complex transformation opportunities, and help customers move from strategy to production deployment and measurable value. The role carries responsibility for the health, performance, and long-term expansion of the partnership. Success requires senior executive presence, sound judgment, commercial discipline, technical fluency, and the ability to operate effectively across a complex, partner-led organization.

In this role, you will:

- 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 AI 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 AI transformation opportunities.
- Engage directly with enterprise executives alongside McKinsey leaders to frame AI 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.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

- 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, GTM, 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.
- Strong executive presence and the judgment to make tradeoffs, resolve conflict, and maintain momentum under ambiguity and scrutiny.
- The ability to influence Product, Research, Sales, Technical, Legal, Finance, Communications, and partner organizations without relying on direct authority.
- Deep literacy in enterprise AI, data, cloud, security, governance, and organizational transformation, with credibility among CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, CDOs, and other senior executives.
- Experience working with data science, AI 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.
- Preferably, experience with private-equity value creation, portfolio transformation, capability building, or large-scale operating-model change.

What success looks like:

- OpenAI and McKinsey have a clear alliance thesis, differentiated value proposition, executive governance model, and measurable joint plan.
- The partnership generates qualified, strategically aligned pipeline and converts priority opportunities into production deployments with demonstrable customer value.
- McKinsey teams can confidently identify, position, design, and support enterprise transformations powered by OpenAI.
- The relationship with QuantumBlack and other McKinsey technology teams produces strong technical collaboration, repeatable solution patterns, and disciplined paths from prototype to production.
- OpenAI resources are allocated transparently and concentrated on opportunities with the greatest strategic, commercial, customer, and repeatable impact.
- Joint assets and transformation approaches move beyond bespoke engagements into reusable, industry-relevant offerings.
- OpenAI’s field understands when and how to engage McKinsey, and McKinsey teams understand OpenAI’s standards, guardrails, resources, and escalation paths.
- The alliance demonstrates sustained executive sponsorship, high-quality delivery, partner accountability, production adoption, and year-over-year growth.

## 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](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.

## About OpenAI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company with a mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity.
- **Entity Type**: Private – structured as a nonprofit parent (OpenAI Foundation) governing a for-profit public benefit corporation (OpenAI Group). The company has confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC, signaling a potential future IPO.
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2015
- **Founders**: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Wojciech Zaremba, and others

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Artificial intelligence research and deployment
- **Target customers**: B2B (enterprises via API and platform), B2C (ChatGPT users), and developers (API, open-source models)
- **Mission**: To ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) – AI systems that are generally smarter than humans – benefits all of humanity.

## Products & Services
- **[ChatGPT](https://openai.com/chatgpt)**: Conversational AI assistant available via web and mobile, used by consumers and integrated into enterprise workflows.
- **[GPT-4 API](https://openai.com/product)**: Large language model accessed via API for developers to build AI-powered applications (text generation, summarization, code assistance, etc.).
- **[DALL-E](https://openai.com/dall-e-3)**: Image generation model that creates images from natural language descriptions.
- **[Whisper](https://openai.com/research/whisper)**: Open-source speech recognition system.
- **[OpenAI Agents](https://openai.com/)**: Emerging product category focused on autonomous AI agents that can perform tasks on behalf of users (announced June 2026).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed in the provided sources. Widely reported in the press at ~$300 billion as of early 2026 (post-funding round), but this figure is not confirmed by OpenAI’s official materials.
- **Key Metric**: Total funding exceeds $13 billion from Microsoft and other investors. The company has also confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC (see [openai.com](https://openai.com/) – “Confidential submission of draft S-1”).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Microsoft (strategic partner and largest investor), with additional participation from Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and others.
- **Growth Signals**: Active hiring with 721 open roles posted; expansion into agent-based products; confidential IPO filing; continued deployment of frontier models.

## Competitive Advantages
- **First-mover & brand recognition**: ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app in history, establishing OpenAI as the household name in generative AI.
- **Research leadership**: Consistently publishes cutting-edge research (GPT-4, DALL-E 3, Whisper, etc.) and attracts top AI talent.
- **Compute & infrastructure**: Exclusive partnership with Microsoft provides massive cloud computing resources (Azure) for training and inference.
- **Unique governance structure**: The nonprofit parent ensures mission alignment (AGI benefiting humanity) while the for-profit arm can raise capital and scale products.

## Strategic Focus
- **Safe AGI development**: Continued emphasis on safety research, alignment, and responsible deployment (e.g., safety systems, model provenance).
- **Enterprise expansion**: Growing ChatGPT Enterprise and API offerings for businesses.
- **Agentic AI**: Building autonomous agents that can “transform work” (announced June 2026).
- **IPO preparation**: Confidential S-1 filing indicates intent to go public, which will require increased financial transparency and governance maturity.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture & values**: OpenAI’s stated values include “Humanity first,” “Act with humility,” “Feel the AGI,” and “Ship joy.” Operating principles emphasize agency, creativity, rapid iteration, and intense focus.
- **Benefits**: Competitive health insurance, mental healthcare support, 24-week paid birth-parent leave (plus 20 weeks for other parents), generous PTO, annual learning & development stipend, daily meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner), and a domestic conference budget.
- **Work environment**: Hybrid/office-based (San Francisco headquarters). The company offers a residency program for researchers and engineers transitioning into AI.
- **Impact**: Employees work directly on frontier AI models that shape the industry and society. The mission-driven nature attracts talent passionate about AGI’s societal implications.

## Sources
1. [OpenAI About Page](https://openai.com/about/)
2. [OpenAI Careers Page](https://openai.com/careers/)
3. [OpenAI Job Search](https://openai.com/careers/search)
4. [OpenAI Homepage](https://openai.com/)

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