Strategic Partnerships Development Manager, K&I Partnerships

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.

This Strategic Partnerships Development Manager for Knowledge, and Information (K&I) Partnerships will drive high-impact initiatives across DeepMind, Google Research, and Tech and Society. Bridging the gap between cutting-edge AI research and real-world societal impact, you will lead critical ecosystem engagements to improve foundational models and public data infrastructure for billions of users. From scaling Indic language capabilities and AI accessibility programs to establishing factual public data infrastructure via Data Commons, this role is critical to ensuring our frontier AI models are highly capable, and localized for the APAC region. You will have the ability to design and manage scaled partnership ecosystems and advance research strategies across complex organizations (Deep Mind (DM), Research, Tech and Society). You will have experience engaging with a set of partners, including the academic institutes (e.g., IISc, AI4Bharat), government ministries, and NGOs. You will have passion for AI accessibility and societal impact, operating comfortably in ambiguity to drive "first-of-its-kind" partnerships in frontier language data collection and model bench marking . You will also have exceptional cross-functional collaboration and operational excellence, managing multiple complex funding streams, data licensing extensions, and Go-To-Market strategies simultaneously.

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:

• Support languages data and partnerships for Google Research to improve multi-linguality affecting ~1.5B users. Drive critical programs such as Vaani phase 3 for Indic data generation with IISc, manage DM agreement extensions for data acquisition, and support strategic Go-To-Market partnerships like the 1800-Gemini rollout.
• Lead the expansion of Data Commons (DC) in APAC, with a primary focus on India. Work closely with government and institutional partners to build example state-level implementations and influence standard data formats. Explore DC Model Context Protocol (MCP) server usage with market players like Sarvam to ground external LLMs on factual Data Commons data.

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
  
• 10 years of experience in business development, partnerships, management consulting, or investment banking, 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 all levels of management.
  
• Experience managing agreements or partnerships.
  

Preferred qualifications:

• Master's degree or other advanced degree.
  
• 10 years of experience in business development, partnerships, or management consulting, with a focus on Frontier AI, Public Sector/Government data infrastructure, or Tech for Social Good.
• Experience establishing and navigating partnerships with government ministries, academic institutions, NGOs, and sophisticated scientific or developer partners.
• Ability to manage ambiguity, with excellent problem-solving skills and strategic mindset to translate problems into project opportunities aligned with evolving business priorities.
• Excellent communication skills, attention to detail, and the ability to influence stakeholders at all levels, with experience building win-win relationships with cross-functional teams.