---
title: 'Partnerships & External Affairs Associate, Global Affairs at OpenAI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/partnerships-external-affairs-associate-global-affairs-openai-san-francisco-qw8hgbfr3nwc'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-12'
---

# Partnerships & External Affairs Associate, Global Affairs at OpenAI

- **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai)
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $171k–$190k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-11-12
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-12
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/a00fce27-16ef-47f0-a584-a1ea37adbc96

## Job description

## About the Team

OpenAI’s Global Affairs team builds relationships with communities to help ensure that artificial intelligence benefits people broadly. The partnership team works with organizations and leaders across education, workforce development, labor, faith, civil rights, and other communities. We build partnerships that help people use AI in ways that matter to their lives, strengthen the organizations serving their communities, and ensure their experiences and concerns help shape OpenAI’s work.

## About the Role

We’re looking for a resourceful partnerships professional who combines strong external relationship skills with the judgment and organizational ability to move complex initiatives forward. You will manage designated external relationships and lead the day-to-day delivery of partnerships across the team’s portfolios and Working with portfolio leads, you will translate agreed objectives into practical programs, represent OpenAI in partner conversations, coordinate internal contributions, and carry commitments through delivery. You will also step into emerging priorities: helping launch a new collaboration, advancing an existing partnership, preparing a senior leader for an external engagement, or coordinating a project involving several teams. Your portfolio will evolve with team priorities, with clear ownership and agreed outcomes for each assignment. This role requires someone who enjoys building relationships and doing the detailed work that makes those relationships productive. You should be comfortable working independently, learning unfamiliar issues quickly, and knowing when to seek expertise or escalate a decision.

In this role, you will:

- Own external relationships. Build and manage trusted relationships with nonprofit organizations, civic leaders, community institutions, and other partners across a range of diverse perspectives and communities.
- Develop and deliver partnerships. Translate shared interests into practical collaborations with clear objectives, scope, responsibilities, timelines, and measures of success.
- Represent OpenAI externally. Lead partner meetings and briefings, participate in convenings, and communicate clearly about AI’s opportunities and safe and responsible use.
- Contribute across the team’s priorities. Take ownership of defined projects across different portfolios, support colleagues during major initiatives, and help establish new areas of engagement.
- Connect partners with internal expertise. Work with policy, product, safety, legal, communications, and education colleagues to develop substantive engagements and secure the contributions needed for delivery.
- Turn stakeholder insight into action. Identify concerns and opportunities, synthesize what we hear, bring relevant feedback to internal owners, and close the loop with partners.
- Deliver funded partnership programs. Translate agreed commitments into feasible workplans with clear owners, milestones, and outcomes. Work directly with partners and portfolio leads to resolve program questions, coordinate implementation, and assess results, including recommendations for improvement or renewal.
- Coordinate partnership implementation across teams. Bring together relationship owners and colleagues in policy, legal, finance, procurement, product, and communications to move agreements, funding processes, and program launches forward; track dependencies, resolve or escalate blockers, and keep partners and internal teams informed of progress.
- Maintain reliable follow-through. Manage workplans, partner commitments, budgets, and approval processes for your projects; surface dependencies and risks early and recommend solutions.
- Exercise sound prioritization. Assess incoming opportunities against team goals, recommend where to invest time and resources, and adjust plans as circumstances change.

You might thrive in this role if you:

- Bring 6+ years of relevant experience in partnerships, external affairs, public policy, campaigns, government, nonprofits, or community engagement, or equivalent experience demonstrating these capabilities.
- Have independently managed external relationships and delivered complex partnership programs, including scoping commitments, coordinating multiple teams, managing budgets, and evaluating outcomes.
- Combine political and stakeholder judgment with strong execution skills, including navigating disagreement and sensitive issues.
- Can build credibility with people whose experiences and views differ from your own.
- Write clearly, communicate confidently, and translate complex topics for nontechnical audiences.
- Are organized and responsive, can manage several projects at once, and take responsibility for completing commitments.
- Work effectively across teams without formal authority and make thoughtful decisions about when to act independently and when to seek alignment.
- Enjoy a varied portfolio and can move between relationship development, strategic thinking, and hands-on delivery.
- Are curious about AI and its implications for communities, public institutions, and economic opportunity.

## 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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