About the Role
The Cloud & AI Partnerships team is looking for a Sr. Alliance Director, AI GTM to facilitate Go-To-Market (GTM) strategies with strategic AI partnerships, including alliances with Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google Gemini. This role requires a unique blend of skills: the GTM fluency of a strategic alliance & business development leader and the Generative AI domain expertise needed to build targeted programmatic GTM motions that create and convert pipeline across global field organizations. Established, existing relationships within the leadership/GTM functions of major AI labs and cloud providers are essential for immediate credibility and accelerated collaboration.
You will be responsible for setting GTM strategy, managing co-sell investment programs, building relationships between Databricks GTM executives and their counterparts at leading AI labs, and driving measurable business outcomes through co-sell and field enablement initiatives. This is a fast-paced, high-visibility role operating with a high degree of autonomy, reporting into the VP of Cloud & AI Partnerships, and collaborating cross-functionally with product & engineering, sales, and marketing.
The Impact You Will Have
- Serve as the primary point-of-contact for senior GTM stakeholders at Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, cultivating trusted, multi-threaded relationships across sales and field engineering.
- Build and manage a QBR and Executive Business Review cadence with each AI partner, anchored on shared GTM goals and co-sell programs.
- Develop and maintain partnership co-sell KPIs and the overarching partner GTM governance framework to provide visibility into the health of programmatic co-sell motions.
- Develop and execute an overarching co-sell strategy across AI Lab partners, including account segmentation and propensity analysis to identify high-impact joint opportunities.
- Plan and operationalize in-person and virtual co-sell programs — including co-sell days, joint pipeline reviews, and partner-led field events — to accelerate top-of-funnel growth and mid-funnel conversion.
- Deliver regular program performance readouts to global sales and partnership leadership, surfacing insights and recommending course corrections.
- Build and manage streamlined partner funding programs designed to accelerate customer adoption of AI solutions.
- Collaborate with enablement and commercialization teams within Databricks to drive board awareness & utilization of funding and customer success programs.
- Partner with product, engineering, and commercial teams to shape the long-term AI model integration roadmap and develop compelling 'better together' messaging for each AI Lab relationship.
- Collaborate with industry GTM teams, ISV and consulting partners, marketing, and corporate development to build joint sales plays, offers, and assets that grow top-of-funnel and increase conversion.
- Develop and maintain field enablement content to equip internal & external field teams with the knowledge and tools to execute on joint GTM priorities and articulate differentiated 'better together' value propositions.
What We Look For
- 10+ years of experience in business development, strategic partnerships, alliance management, or GTM strategy, with a meaningful portion of that time spent in the Cloud and AI ecosystem.
- Proven track record building GTM programs and growing high-visibility partnerships with major technology companies, ideally cloud hyper-scalers or frontier model providers.
- Deep understanding of Generative AI products, go-to-market models, and the competitive AI landscape, including familiarity with the positioning and capabilities of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and comparable frontier model providers.
- Experience in Generative AI product development, GTM, or alliance roles is strongly preferred.
- Analytical rigor: able to build first-principles business cases, model consumption, and derive data-driven insights to support partnership investment and program prioritization decisions.
- Strong GTM fluency, including familiarity with enterprise co-sell motions, account segmentation methodologies, pipeline management, and field enablement strategies.
- Excellent communication and executive presence — capable of distilling complex multi-dimensional analyses into clear, compelling narratives for senior internal and external audiences.
- Strong cross-functional leadership, ownership mindset, and bias for action. Comfortable driving deal and program processes autonomously while mobilizing large, matrixed organizations.
- MBA or equivalent advanced degree preferred. Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or demonstrated technical aptitude, is a plus.