Partnerships Associate

Generalist; San Mateo, Somerville (CA, MA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Generalist is seeking a dynamic partner manager in San Mateo, CA to build and scale collaborations with external partners. You will communicate Generalist’s robotics and AI capabilities, qualify opportunities, and drive cross-functional programs from initial contact through execution.

You will own multi-stakeholder partnerships, coordinate with ML/engineering, product, and GTM teams, and travel to industry events to represent the company and nurture the ecosystem.

Qualifications

• 2–5 years of professional experience in demanding environments.
• Strong organizational, project management, and communication skills.
• Ability to own multiple cross-functional initiatives and drive outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Partner relationships: act as a high-energy contact for prospective partners, communicating Generalist’s technology and vision clearly.
• Technical fluency: become a super user of Generalist’s models and technology, explain complex concepts and identify use cases.
• Partnership qualification & development: evaluate opportunities, understand needs, prioritize opportunities, and move engagements forward.
• Project management: own partner initiatives end-to-end with clear workplans, owners, milestones, and timelines.
• Communication & organization: manage a high volume of parallel partner workstreams and synthesize technical topics for partners and internal teams.
• Cross-functional coordination: work with ML/engineering, product, GTM, and leadership to surface decisions and ensure follow-through.
• Travel & ecosystem engagement: represent Generalist with partners at events as needed.

Job description

About Generalist

At Generalist, we are on a mission to build general intelligence for the physical world and make it useful to everyone. 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.

Responsibilities

• Partner relationships: Serve as a high-energy point of contact for prospective partners, communicating Generalist’s technology and vision clearly, building strong relationships, and identifying opportunities for meaningful partnerships.

• Technical fluency: Become a super user of Generalist’s models and technology, developing the technical fluency to explain complex concepts clearly, demonstrate capabilities, identify compelling use cases, and help partners understand what is possible.

• Partnership qualification & development: Evaluate partnership opportunities, quickly understand partner needs and potential value, prioritize the strongest opportunities, and move promising relationships toward concrete next steps.

• Project management: Own partner initiatives end-to-end, translating conversations into clear workplans, owners, milestones, and timelines and keeping internal and external stakeholders moving toward outcomes.

• Communication & organization: Bring exceptional organization and written and verbal communication to a high volume of parallel partner workstreams; synthesize complex technical and business topics into clear partner-facing communication, internal updates, decisions, and next steps.

• Cross-functional coordination: Work closely with ML/engineering, product, GTM, and leadership to coordinate partner needs, surface decisions, minimize internal overhead, and ensure strong follow-through.

• Travel & ecosystem engagement: Represent Generalist with partners and at relevant industry events and conferences as needed.

Minimum Qualifications

• 2–5 years of professional experience in a highly demanding, high-ownership environment, such as a technology company, startup, management consulting, or similar, with a track record of delivering high-quality work on tight timelines.

• Proven ability to own and drive multiple cross-functional initiatives simultaneously, create clarity from ambiguity, and execute end-to-end with minimal oversight.

• Exceptional organizational and project management skills; able to manage a high volume of parallel conversations and workstreams without losing track of details, owners, timelines, or follow-up.

• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to understand complex technical concepts and explain them clearly and compellingly to different audiences.

• Strong technical curiosity and demonstrated ability to quickly develop fluency in complex products or technologies.

• High energy, responsiveness, and strong interpersonal skills; genuinely enjoys meeting new people, building relationships, and representing technology enthusiastically with external partners.

• Strong judgment and ability to quickly assess opportunities, prioritize where to invest time, and drive conversations toward clear next steps.

• High integrity, reliability, and consistent follow-through.

• Comfort operating in a fast-changing environment where priorities, processes, and responsibilities may sometimes be ambiguous and evolve quickly.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working in AI/ML, robotics, developer platforms, or another complex technical environment.

• Experience owning partner or customer engagements from initial conversation through execution and ongoing success.

• Experience in partnerships, business development, product/program management, strategy & operations, or another role combining external relationships with operational execution.

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