Partner Director, McKinsey Alliance

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. 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