The Role

We are looking for an exceptional individual to join our Applied AI & Partnerships team in a high-impact, high-ownership role. This role is critical to the company: you will help build and scale our ecosystem by driving partner activation and growth, shape the ecosystem strategy that expands adoption, and ensure partner learnings (qualitative and quantitative) flow back into product and model improvements.

You will be a central force in building and advancing relationships, maximizing their utility for both the company and our partners, and keeping complex, cross-functional work moving. Being optimally successful requires building a deep understanding of what matters to partners, earning their trust through responsiveness and follow-through, and aligning roadmaps and expectations across teams. You should be comfortable engaging with a diversity of partners and industries, and flexing between strategic thinking, operational rigor, and crisp external and internal communication.

This is a high-growth role with significant visibility, direct exposure to leadership, and real ownership of outcomes. This role is in-person five days a week based in San Mateo, CA.

Responsibilities

• Strategic partnership execution: Own and drive a portfolio of high-impact partner initiatives end-to-end, ensuring alignment with company goals and maximizing long-term value.

• Partnership evaluation and selection: Evaluate incoming ecosystem and partnership opportunities, prioritize them, and ensure alignment with strategic objectives.

• Ecosystem growth strategy: Define and drive ecosystem initiatives that expand adoption and deepen partner engagement (programs, partner journeys, scalable motions, playbooks).

• Executive communication: Serve as a primary point of contact for partner workstreams—respond rapidly, navigate complex organizational structures, and keep initiatives moving forward through clear next steps and timelines.

• Cross-functional coordination: Centralize communication and documentation across product, ML/engineering, GTM, and partnerships stakeholders to optimize efficiency and minimize disruption.

• Operational execution: Translate ambiguity into execution, coordinate the details, and follow through relentlessly

• Communications and narrative: Develop and ship ecosystem-facing and internal materials to ensure consistent messaging around launches and key moments.

• Metrics and tracking: Develop and maintain centralized tracking systems to monitor ecosystem/partnership metrics, milestones, and outcomes; use data to drive decisions and next actions.

• Insights and feedback loops: Capture partner learnings and package them into actionable internal recommendations supporting durable product/model feedback loops.

• Travel: Ability to travel periodically to build relationships, support partners, and attend conferences as needed.
  

Minimum Qualifications

• 3–5 years of professional experience in a highly demanding, high-ownership environment, such as management consulting, technology companies, and/or startups, with a track record of delivering high-quality work on tight timelines.

• Proven experience driving cross-functional initiatives in one or more of: strategy & ops/biz ops, partnerships, ecosystem programs, product ops, program management, or growth/ops.

• Demonstrated ability to create clarity from ambiguity, prioritize effectively, and execute end-to-end with minimal oversight.

• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills; able to produce crisp partner-facing narratives and exec-ready internal updates.

• Strong interpersonal skills and high responsiveness; able to build trust with external partners and internal teams at all levels.

• Comfort with metrics and operational tracking; able to build and maintain simple systems (trackers, reporting cadences, templates) and use data to drive decisions.

• High integrity and reliability; consistent follow-through and strong ownership mindset.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience building or scaling ecosystem motions, such as in a growth-stage startup.

• Experience working in AI/ML, robotics, developer platforms, or other complex technical/product-driven ecosystems.

• Experience owning partner/customer engagements from kickoff through launch and ongoing success.

• Familiarity with product management fundamentals (requirements, success metrics, prioritization, roadmap inputs) and translating external feedback into internal action.

• Demonstrated ability to craft clear external narratives and crisp internal decision memos for high-visibility workstreams.

What we offer

• Real ownership and real outcomes: you’ll own meaningful, externally-facing workstreams that directly impact ecosystem growth, partner success, and what we build next.

• High-trust, high-autonomy environment: we move fast with a bias toward action. You’ll have latitude to define the approach, build lightweight systems, and make decisions to keep momentum.

• Direct exposure and visibility: you’ll work closely with senior leaders and key cross-functional stakeholders, with frequent opportunities to shape priorities, narratives, and execution.

• A rare mix of strategy and execution: this role sits at the intersection of ecosystem strategy, partner delivery, communications/narrative, and operating cadence—ideal if you like both “figuring it out” and “making it real.”

• Steep learning curve and career acceleration: you’ll build durable skills in partnership strategy, program design, stakeholder management, product/ML feedback loops, and executive communication.

• Room to build: you’ll create playbooks, templates, and programs that scale—your work becomes the operating system others rely on.

• Collaborative, mission-driven team: a world-class group that values rigor, candor, and follow-through, and cares deeply about building responsibly and effectively.

About Generalist

At Generalist, we are on a mission to make general-purpose robots a reality. 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 (PaLM-E, RT-2, Gemini Robotics), launched and scaled ChatGPT and GPT-4 to hundreds of millions of users, engineered the foundations of autonomous driving, built next-generation robots (Atlas, Spot, Stretch) and pushed the limits of what they can do (from parkour to manipulation, and testing robustness).

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.