Partner Director, India

About the Team

The APAC Partnerships team builds and grows a high-impact partner ecosystem that helps customers adopt OpenAI solutions successfully, advances OpenAI’s mission, and supports the company’s growth.

About the Role

We are hiring a Partner Director to shape and execute OpenAI’s partner strategy in India, with a major focus on building a high-impact AWS-centered go-to-market motion.

You will work closely with AWS and a prioritised ecosystem of services partners to generate partner-sourced opportunities, deliver customer wins, and develop repeatable solutions. You will translate the broader APAC AWS strategy into a practical India operating plan, aligning AWS field teams, services partners, and OpenAI teams around the most valuable opportunities.

This is a hands-on role with responsibility across the full services-partner lifecycle: identifying and prioritising prospective partners, leading contracting, activating newly signed partners, growing strategic relationships, and managing performance.

You will work with a mix of India-headquartered and global services partners, selecting the right portfolio based on market needs. You will build senior executive relationships while also driving the operating rhythms required to turn partnerships into measurable results.

This role reports to the APAC Partnerships Lead in Singapore and is based in India.

In this role you will:

• Contribute to and partially own the India partner strategy and annual operating plan, with a primary focus on AWS.

• Translate the APAC AWS partnership strategy into local priorities, target accounts, partner activation plans, and measurable outcomes for India.

• Build strong relationships with AWS India leadership and its partner, sales, and technical teams.

• Mobilise a prioritised portfolio of services partners around the OpenAI and AWS opportunity in India.

• Identify, evaluate, recruit, and contract with services partners based on market needs and strategic priorities.

• Own the contracting process end to end, coordinating with legal, finance, and leadership teams through approval and signature.

• Drive joint account planning and field engagement with AWS and priority services partners to grow partner-sourced opportunities and deliver customer wins.

• Manage strategic relationships with both India-headquartered partners and the India or regional leadership teams of global partners.

• Drive partner onboarding across sales training, technical enablement, security and provisioning, and support operations.

• Collaborate with AWS, services partners, and internal teams to develop repeatable solutions, customer propositions, demo assets, delivery playbooks, and localised technical documentation.

• Establish governance for priority partnerships, including operating reviews, executive business reviews, milestone tracking, and escalation processes.

• Build scalable operating processes for the India partner ecosystem, including reporting, playbooks, activation plans, and performance management.

• Monitor partner performance, identify risks early, and drive remediation or acceleration plans.

• Coordinate across Sales, Solutions Engineering, Enablement, Operations, Customer Success, and Marketing to ensure internal alignment and partner success.

• Coordinate with Marketing on AWS-related launches, campaigns, enablement activities, and market-facing events.

• Represent OpenAI with senior partner executives and at relevant external events.

• Travel regularly across India, with occasional travel across APAC and to the United States.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• 10+ years of experience in partnerships, alliances, partner success, or enterprise sales within enterprise software, consulting, or systems-integration environments.

• Demonstrated experience building partner-led go-to-market motions with AWS, ideally within the Indian enterprise market.

• A strong understanding of the AWS ecosystem, including how hyperscaler field teams, partner organisations, and services partners work together to generate and convert customer opportunities.

• Experience building and growing a portfolio of services partners, from initial identification and contracting through activation and scaled execution.

• Strong knowledge of the Indian enterprise ecosystem and experience working with both local and global partner organisations.

• A track record of influencing partner-sourced growth, supporting customer wins, and developing repeatable solutions.

• The ability to translate a regional partnership strategy into local account priorities, partner plans, and operating cadences.

• Experience managing senior executive relationships while remaining comfortable working through operational details.

• Strong commercial judgement and the ability to prioritise investments across a diverse partner landscape.

• Excellent program-management skills, with the ability to manage multiple workstreams and hold cross-functional stakeholders accountable.

• Experience operating in an early-stage or high-growth environment where processes are still being built.

• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to influence without authority and drive urgency with empathy.

• Professional fluency in English.

Preferred

• Experience working with AI products, AI-enabled solutions, or an emerging technology ecosystem.

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.

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.

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