Anyone who trades with Google knows Philip Schindler

As chief business officer, Mr. Schindler, 51, leads sales for Google’s online advertising products and most of the company’s other services, a $230 billion-a-year portfolio that accounts for more than 90% of parent company Alphabet. Inc

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Revenues. He designed new ways to package the company’s businesses together, with clients in a wide and complex list of partnerships.

And that puts the 6-foot-5-inch German at the forefront of Google’s biggest battles, facing off against those who believe the company is abusing its market position. The Justice Department is expected to file its second antitrust lawsuit in three years against Google in the coming weeks, this time targeting the online advertising broker. The first antitrust case, over the company’s dominance in search, is due to go to trial next year.

Google has said it does not abuse its marketplace, and Mr. Schindler has often emphasized to business partners and regulators that the company makes money only when its customers succeed, according to executives who have worked with him and negotiated with him.

Some negotiators with Mr. Schindler continued to take a conciliatory approach, offering few concrete concessions, much to the chagrin of business partners.

Internet conglomerate IAC Inc., which earns hundreds of millions of dollars a year through a deal with Google. “It’s one of the toughest and biggest jobs in corporate America,” said CEO Joey Levine. Mr. Levine said he sometimes disagreed with the search giant’s competitive tactics, but found Mr. Schindler to be an honest broker who listened to customer complaints.

Mr. Schindler, a married father of three, keeps an unusually low profile for a technology executive. Friends said he was an avid outdoorsman who enjoyed skiing, jet-setting camping trips and hydrofoiling, a water sport similar to surfing that allows you to float a foot above the ocean’s surface.

He is also known for drawing comical innuendos in disarming business meetings. In the year At the 2017 meeting, he adapted a phrase from “Star Trek” to quell a dispute with the press: “Long live and healthy, we will come in peace.”

Spotify Technology SA helped lead a group of companies criticizing Apple’s payments. Inc.

And Google collects from purchases made in apps downloaded from their mobile store. In March, Mr. Schindler brokered a novel deal that would allow the streaming service to offer alternatives to Spotify’s standard 30% fee. It’s part of a program that Google extends to other developers.

In an emailed statement, Spotify CEO Daniel Eck said Mr. Schindler “believes in building bridges and not walls.”

A graduate of Germany’s European Business School, Mr. Schindler joined German conglomerate Bertelsmann SE in the mid-1990s, focusing on new media services at the dawn of the consumer Internet.

Google in 2010 Shortly after its initial public offering in 2004, the company hired Mr. Schindler to oversee operations in Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Scandinavia.

One of his first big challenges was introducing Street View, a massive effort to feed panoramic photos into the Google Maps product. European politicians and analysts attacked Street View before its launch in 2010, saying the service was a violation of privacy because it shared photos of homes and vehicles without the owner’s consent.

As the debate raged, Mr. Schindler traveled to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., to work with engineers on things like manipulating faces and license plates. In Germany, where there is some strong opposition, Mr. Schindler helped negotiate a condition where residents asked to have their home’s image blurred, and publicly defended the service.

“We respect people’s privacy very much,” Mr. Schindler told the German newspaper Bild at the time. “But there is nothing more public than the front of the house.”

In the year In 2012, Google promoted Mr. Schindler to a US-based role overseeing global sales and operations. Three years later, Sundar Pichai won the title of business officer following his appointment as Google’s CEO.

“Philip is one of the few Germans who has made it in Silicon Valley,” said Matthias Dopfner, chief executive of German publisher Axel Springer, a longtime critic of Google’s practices. He deserves it because he is smart and diplomatically a strong negotiator.

Alphabet’s board has awarded more than $93.5 million in stock grants to any executive except Mr. Pichai over the past three years.

Messrs. Pichai and Schindler, current and former Google executives, said they worked together to more closely integrate Google’s broad product areas into a unified vision.

Over time, the guys moved all of Google’s business-development and partnership teams under Mr. Schindler’s control. More than 29,000 employees work under Mr. Schindler, the second-most of any business line except cloud computing.

The result is that almost all major business decisions regarding services to customers and others are made through Mr. Schindler’s team, in addition to the company’s product managers. Under Mr. Schindler, Google also created a list of “priority partners” such as Verizon Communications. Inc.

According to people familiar with the changes, those who interact with the company in various product areas need more attention.

“We used to be very different, and now we’re more integrated,” said Don Harrison, Google’s president of global partnerships and corporate development, who gave the report to Mr Schindler.

The moves mean Mr. Schindler is often the first port of call for frustrated business partners.

In the year In 2017, Google sent in Mr. Schindler to quell the problem after ads from major brands appeared alongside videos containing racist and anti-Semitic content. Mr. Schindler issued a Google statement saying company officials “profoundly apologized” to advertisers and launched a hearing campaign.

Proctor and gambling Co.

The world’s largest advertiser and frequent critic of Google’s influence on online markets was initially unconvinced, prompting a widespread boycott of the YouTube platform.

In one two-hour meeting with Mark Pritchard, P&G’s chief brand officer, Mr. Schindler went into “exciting detail” about YouTube’s plans to fix the crisis, said Kirk Perry, a former Google advertising executive.

The two companies have agreed that P&G will continue to advertise if YouTube makes improvements to its rating system. In March 2018, P&G said it would resume advertising on YouTube. P&G declined to comment.

Recently, Mr. Schindler has turned his attention to a variety of hot-button issues, including opting out of web tracking software known as cookies in the Google Chrome browser. Fewer than the list of lawsuits targeting Google’s core businesses.

To fend off an upcoming antitrust case, the company proposed to spin off part of its ad technology business into a separate company under the Alphabet umbrella. The Justice Department rejected the proposal, and a lawsuit is expected to proceed in the coming weeks, people familiar with the matter said. The Justice Department declined to comment.

Any moves would hamper Mr. Schindler’s efforts to sell big brands through Google’s own properties and other online publishers’ automated systems that run ads. Google has consistently said it has no plans to diversify its ad tech business.

Some of Mr. Schindler’s business dealings have been found to be controversial and have led to the investigation of antitrust authorities seeking to rein in Google.

An agreement Mr. Schindler signed with Meta Platforms Inc

The deal, known as JD Blue, forms a key element in a sweeping antitrust lawsuit by government attorneys seeking to break up Google’s ad-tech business.

As part of the deal, in more than a dozen states, Google offered Facebook “data, speed and other benefits” in auctions for mobile ad spots for Facebook publishers. Antitrust authorities in the European Union and the United Kingdom launched their own investigations into the deal after the complaint was made public. Google and Facebook have disputed the claim that the attorney general misrepresented the agreement.

Last month, a federal judge in New York dismissed the states’ claims related to JD Blue, allowing most of the other arguments in the suit to proceed.

Instead of viewing the agreement as an antitrust violation, Judge Kevin Castel of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York said Google’s actions were “consistent with an organization.”

In early March, Mr. Schindler drew the ire of the Justice Department by repeatedly invoking attorney-client privilege in emails discussing business matters. The DOJ has filed a motion to compel Google to turn over more emails. A federal judge hearing the case rejected the government’s request.

A Justice Department filing said Mr. Schindler asked for a “specified email” to discuss the “last known status” of a business partner’s unhappiness with Google.

—Kek Hage and Sam Schechner contributed to this article.

Write Miles Kruppa at miles.kruppa@wsj.com