Strategic Partner Development Lead, AI Innovation and Research

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
  
• 7 years of experience in business development, partnerships, management consulting, or investment banking, or 5 years with advanced degree.
  
• Experience in the Consumer Electronics, Auto, OEMs, Telecom, E-Commerce/Retail, Apps, Ads, Gaming, or Technology industries.
  
• Experience working with C-level executives and cross-functionally across multiple levels of management.
  
• Experience managing agreements or partnerships.
• Experience working cross-functionally with finance, legal, marketing, product, engineering, and legal teams.

Preferred qualifications:

• Understanding of content acquisition and distribution strategies.
• Ability to lead and influence in a complex matrixed organization and balance engaging priorities.
• Ability to pivot quickly as business needs evolve.
• A positive attitude and growth mindset.

About the job

As a Strategic Partner Development Manager, you'll open doors with potential partners, lead exploratory discussions and evaluate/develop business opportunities. You will lead cross-functional teams, provide thought leadership and serve as a mentor to managers and associates. You are comfortable escalating and presenting business development strategies and key issues to senior management. You'll work closely with Google Product, Engineering, Legal and Sales teams on new product initiatives and key strategic relationships that support our online advertising business.

The AI Innovation and Research (AIR) product team is the catalyst for AI innovation in Platforms and Devices, accelerating development, transforming user experiences, and amplifying market leadership through exceptional AI capabilities.

The Global Partnerships organization is responsible for exploring new opportunities with Google's partners. Google’s Global Partnerships team works with a wide range of partners to bring the best of Google to power their business. The Global Partnerships team supports Google’s own Product teams with essential partnerships to help Google’s user experiences in advertising, Search, Assistant, Maps, Travel, Shopping, Payments and more. Teams create product-enabling partnerships, go-to-market strategies and incubate business growth for a variety of products.

Responsibilities

• Lead the strategy for AIR product priorities, covering product partnerships, data licensing, go-to-market execution, and launch readiness to accelerate Google AI adoption across P&D and third-party products.
• Cultivate relationships with partners to demonstrate the commercial value of Google’s applied AI and create powerful joint-innovation storytelling use cases.
• Build the partner ecosystem for Private AI Compute infrastructure to unlock launch capabilities and build public trust. Secure custom multi-year agreements supporting system privacy, security, and verifiability while managing funding and driving internal and external adoption.
• Conduct strategic landscape reviews and build/buy/partner analyses of exceptional AI startups across key verticals, targeting specialties like multi-sensor foundational models, health monitoring, and agentic UI.
• Partner closely with key AI teams (Gemini, DeepMind), P&D groups (Pixel, Android, Chrome, Play, Home and Health), and cross-functional teams to ensure alignment and execution.