---
title: 'Partnerships Associate at Generalist'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/partnerships-associate-generalist-san-mateo-6tjbtw8vd9hs'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-16'
---

# Partnerships Associate at Generalist

- **Company:** Generalist
- **Location:** San Mateo, CA / Somerville, MA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-09-09
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-16
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/generalist/db4da869-0fc1-4531-af54-afdb4d1fcdd0

## Job description

## About Generalist

At Generalist, we are on a mission to build general intelligence for the physical world and make it useful to everyone. We believe the industries and homes of the future will depend on humans and machines working together in new ways. Robots can help us build more and get more done. We build embodied foundation models, starting with a focus on dexterity. This requires advancing the frontiers of data, models, and hardware, to enable robots to intelligently interact with the physical world. The company embraces both large-scale AI and robotics as core to its DNA. Our team of researchers, roboticists, and company builders come from OpenAI, Boston Dynamics, Google DeepMind, and other frontier labs—with a track record of shipping AI breakthroughs. Before Generalist, we pioneered large embodied multimodal models and vision-language-action models https://research.google/blog/palm-e-an-embodied-multimodal-language-model/ [RT-2](https://deepmind.google/blog/rt-2-new-model-translates-vision-and-language-into-action/), [Gemini Robotics](https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-robotics/)), launched and scaled [ChatGPT](https://chatgpt.com/) and [GPT-4](https://openai.com/index/gpt-4-research/) to hundreds of millions of users, engineered the foundations of autonomous driving, built next-generation robots ([Atlas](https://bostondynamics.com/atlas/), [Spot](https://bostondynamics.com/products/spot/), [Stretch](https://bostondynamics.com/products/stretch/)) and pushed the limits of what they can do (from [parkour](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF4DML7FIWk) to [manipulation](https://bostondynamics.com/blog/large-behavior-models-atlas-find-new-footing/), and [testing robustness](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFuA50H9uek)). 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.

## Responsibilities

- Partner relationships: Serve as a high-energy point of contact for prospective partners, communicating Generalist’s technology and vision clearly, building strong relationships, and identifying opportunities for meaningful partnerships.
- Technical fluency: Become a super user of Generalist’s models and technology, developing the technical fluency to explain complex concepts clearly, demonstrate capabilities, identify compelling use cases, and help partners understand what is possible.
- Partnership qualification & development: Evaluate partnership opportunities, quickly understand partner needs and potential value, prioritize the strongest opportunities, and move promising relationships toward concrete next steps.
- Project management: Own partner initiatives end-to-end, translating conversations into clear workplans, owners, milestones, and timelines and keeping internal and external stakeholders moving toward outcomes.
- Communication & organization: Bring exceptional organization and written and verbal communication to a high volume of parallel partner workstreams; synthesize complex technical and business topics into clear partner-facing communication, internal updates, decisions, and next steps.
- Cross-functional coordination: Work closely with ML/engineering, product, GTM, and leadership to coordinate partner needs, surface decisions, minimize internal overhead, and ensure strong follow-through.
- Travel & ecosystem engagement: Represent Generalist with partners and at relevant industry events and conferences as needed.

## Minimum Qualifications

- 2–5 years of professional experience in a highly demanding, high-ownership environment, such as a technology company, startup, management consulting, or similar, with a track record of delivering high-quality work on tight timelines.
- Proven ability to own and drive multiple cross-functional initiatives simultaneously, create clarity from ambiguity, and execute end-to-end with minimal oversight.
- Exceptional organizational and project management skills; able to manage a high volume of parallel conversations and workstreams without losing track of details, owners, timelines, or follow-up.
- Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to understand complex technical concepts and explain them clearly and compellingly to different audiences.
- Strong technical curiosity and demonstrated ability to quickly develop fluency in complex products or technologies.
- High energy, responsiveness, and strong interpersonal skills; genuinely enjoys meeting new people, building relationships, and representing technology enthusiastically with external partners.
- Strong judgment and ability to quickly assess opportunities, prioritize where to invest time, and drive conversations toward clear next steps.
- High integrity, reliability, and consistent follow-through.
- Comfort operating in a fast-changing environment where priorities, processes, and responsibilities may sometimes be ambiguous and evolve quickly.

## Preferred Qualifications

- Experience working in AI/ML, robotics, developer platforms, or another complex technical environment.
- Experience owning partner or customer engagements from initial conversation through execution and ongoing success.
- Experience in partnerships, business development, product/program management, strategy & operations, or another role combining external relationships with operational execution.
- Demonstrated ability to craft clear external narratives and crisp internal decision memos for high-visibility workstreams.

## About Generalist

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Generalist is a frontier AI research and product company building general-purpose intelligence for the physical world through embodied foundation models for robots.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A)
- **Headquarters**: San Mateo, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Pete Florence (Co-Founder & CEO), Andy Zeng (Co-Founder & Chief Scientist)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Robotics Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Embodied AI
- **Target customers**: B2B – enterprises operating factories, warehouses, laboratories, restaurants, and logistics centers; eventually homes.
- **Mission**: “Make general-purpose robots a reality. We build embodied foundation models for the physical world.”

## Products & Services
- **GEN-1**: General-purpose AI model for robotics that achieves ~99% average success rate on tasks (vs. 64% for prior state-of-the-art) and completes tasks roughly 3x faster. Trained on half a million hours of real-world data collected via low-cost wearable devices. Available to early-access partners as a model or API. [therobotreport.com](https://www.therobotreport.com/generalist-introduces-gen-1-general-purpose-model-for-physical-ai/)
- **GEN-0**: Previous generation model that demonstrated scaling laws in robotics. Used as the foundation for GEN-1.
- **Data Collection Devices**: Proprietary low-cost wearable hardware that captures human activities at scale, enabling pretraining without large teleoperation or simulation datasets.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly available
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding – $128M (Series A closed March 2025; earlier seed round led by NVentures) [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/generalistai)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: NVentures (seed lead); Board Director Ellen Chisa. Series A investor not named in public data.
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount grew 325% YoY to 42 employees. GEN-1 model released five months after GEN-0, with production-level reliability. Early-access partnerships underway. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/generalistai)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Model performance**: GEN-1 achieves 99% average success rate across tasks like kitting auto parts, folding T-shirts, packing phones – a step change from sub-70% success by previous models.
- **Data efficiency**: Trained primarily on human demonstration data (wearable devices) rather than expensive robot teleoperation data; can match previous models with 10x less task-specific data.
- **Algorithmic innovations**: Custom training kernels, paged attention for real-time inference, Harmonic Reasoning, and RL post-training enable improvisation and recovery from unexpected scenarios.
- **Team pedigree**: Founders and key hires from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Boston Dynamics – bringing experience from ChatGPT, GPT-4, PaLM-E, RT-2, Gemini Robotics, Atlas, Spot, and Stretch.

## Strategic Focus
- Current priorities: Scale GEN-1’s embodied foundation model to master more complex physical tasks, expand into economically valuable settings (manufacturing, logistics, healthcare), and build the data infrastructure needed for general-purpose robots. The company is “accelerating the next phase of factories, homes, and the broader physical world.”

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Tight-knit, research-forward environment with a mix of AI and hardware engineering. On-site presence in San Francisco (SFO) and Boston (BOS). [generalistai.com/careers](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/generalist)
- **Remote/Hybrid Policy**: All open positions are listed as “On-site” (no remote or hybrid options).
- **Notable Perks**: Not explicitly disclosed, but the startup’s rapid growth and $128M funding suggest competitive compensation and equity. The team consists of leading roboticists and AI researchers, offering exposure to cutting-edge work.
- **Engineering Culture**: Heavy emphasis on technical staff (Software Engineers in ML Infra, Robotics Controls, ML Optimization, Infrastructure; Research Scientists in pretraining and post-training). Roles include hands-on robot operation and systems building.

## Sources
1. [generalistai.com](https://generalistai.com/)
2. [generalistai.com/careers](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/generalist)
3. [generalistai.com/about](https://generalistai.com/about)
4. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/generalistai)
5. [therobotreport.com](https://www.therobotreport.com/generalist-introduces-gen-1-general-purpose-model-for-physical-ai/)

## Other roles at Generalist

- [Partnerships Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/partnerships-lead-generalist-boston-8nybcad5s025) — Boston, MA
- [Strategic Deals Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-deals-lead-generalist-san-mateo-0rmkzfk4tqkx) — San Mateo, CA
- [Senior Legal Counsel](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-legal-counsel-generalist-san-mateo-t600f8nkb79n) — San Mateo, CA
- [Recruiting Coordinator](https://feeny.ai/job/recruiting-coordinator-generalist-san-mateo-c8zkjanpaav9) — San Mateo, CA
- [Talent Acquisition Partner](https://feeny.ai/job/talent-acquisition-partner-generalist-san-mateo-ky6enky5hd1r) — San Mateo, CA / Somerville, MA
- [Research Scientist: Post-Training](https://feeny.ai/job/research-scientist-post-training-generalist-san-mateo-vrnttp54gr4z) — San Mateo, CA / Somerville, MA
- [Data Partnerships](https://feeny.ai/job/data-partnerships-generalist-san-mateo-tm0yccvmgxm3) — San Mateo, CA / Somerville, MA
- [Mechanical Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/mechanical-engineer-generalist-boston-74p3xtqpvs13) — Boston, MA
- [Electrical Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/electrical-engineer-generalist-san-mateo-x985d69q4w17) — San Mateo, CA / Somerville, MA
- [Research Assistant](https://feeny.ai/job/research-assistant-generalist-san-mateo-1ahfzy22gp7s) — San Mateo, CA / Somerville, MA