Strategic Business Development, Startups Lead

Spun out of MIT CSAIL, we build general-purpose AI systems that run efficiently across deployment targets, from data center accelerators to on-device hardware, ensuring low latency, minimal memory usage, privacy, and reliability. We partner with enterprises across consumer electronics, automotive, life sciences, and financial services. We are scaling rapidly and need exceptional people to help us get there.

As the first person on our business team focused entirely on startups, you’ll turn growing interest from founders and technical teams into a business. You’ll win and grow startup customers, design the program and commercial offers to serve them at scale, and bring their needs back to the engineers building the product. Working closely with engineering, our ML teams, and marketing, you’ll have the autonomy to shape how we serve startups.

We need someone who:

• Sharp commercial judgment, the capability that matters most in this role: you can design an offer or deal structure (credits, usage-based pricing, committed spend) that works for the customer and for Liquid, and walk through its economics.

• A track record of selling directly to startups: you have closed deals with founders and technical teams and know how they evaluate, buy, and scale.

• Experience selling a technical platform, such as cloud, data, or AI infrastructure, that customers build on rather than a finished application.

• Enough technical fluency to earn engineers' respect: you can discuss models, APIs, latency, and cost, ask useful questions, and keep up in technical conversations.

• Experience at an early-stage startup.

• Experience building a startup, developer, or partner program, or relationships with the VCs, accelerators, and founder communities that feed one.

• A technical background, such as engineering experience or a customer-facing technical role.

• Startup revenue has grown many times over.

• Startups have a repeatable path from first credits to committed contracts: a program and commercial offers that close again and again without being reinvented for each deal.