Partnerships Lead, Southern Europe

The role

You will lead the partner sales and development team for Southern Europe. You will manage a regional team, own the regional partner business, and work with Sales leadership and strategic partners to drive revenue and customer adoption.

What you will do

• Own the partner sales and development plan for Southern Europe.
• Drive regional commercial outcomes including pipeline, bookings, and production adoption.
• Identify and develop new partner-led opportunities.
• Lead account mapping and joint account planning with OpenAI sellers and partner teams.
• Orchestrate complex co-sell pursuits.
• Build relationships with regional partner executives and field leaders.
• Partner with Solutions Engineering, Customer Success, Product, and partner delivery teams.
• Create repeatable field engagement models, partner enablement, and sales plays.
• Establish disciplined pipeline reviews, forecasting, and performance reporting.
• Hire, manage, coach, and develop a high-performing regional partner sales and development team.

Required qualifications

• Significant experience in enterprise sales, partner sales, strategic alliances, or business development within cloud, AI, SaaS, or enterprise technology.
• A track record of owning regional or segment-level business outcomes and delivering measurable pipeline, revenue, and customer growth through partners.
• Demonstrated direct people management experience in partner sales, enterprise sales, alliances, or a related GTM function, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and team development.
• Deep familiarity with cloud providers, global systems integrators, consulting firms, or technology partner ecosystems.
• Experience creating opportunities and leading complex partnerships or customer engagements from discovery through expansion.
• Strong enterprise sales fundamentals, including account planning, opportunity qualification, stakeholder mapping, negotiation, pipeline management, and forecasting.
• The ability to earn trust with Sales leaders, partner executives, technical teams, and peers.
• Technical-commercial fluency to understand customer use cases and engage product and technical teams.
• Strong operational judgment and a builder mindset.
• Clear communication, executive presence, self-awareness, and a collaborative approach.

Nice to have

• Experience managing geographically distributed teams and aligning account or territory coverage across a region.
• Experience building or scaling a regional partner sales or co-sell business at a high-growth technology company.
• Experience aligning sales and partner delivery organisations to support enterprise implementations and sustained production adoption.
• Familiarity with AI platforms, modern cloud architectures, cloud marketplaces, and enterprise procurement models.

About the company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity.