Strategic Business Development

ROLE: STRATEGIC BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

Department: Go-to-Market & Partnerships

Location: San Francisco, Boston

Location Type: Hybrid

Employment Type: Full-time

About Liquid AI

Liquid AI’s mission is to build efficient, general-purpose intelligence at every scale. Founded out of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT in 2023, we build small, efficient, and incredibly fast foundation models that can run directly on the devices all around us—phones, cars, and laptops—with no internet needed. We are scaling and need exceptional people to drive our growth.

About the role

We are seeking a strategic business development lead to turn our early enterprise traction into long-term partnerships and revenue. You will drive adoption of Liquid Foundation Models and help shape how our products and platform are built and taken to market. You will run deals from the first conversation to close, make calls where there is no playbook, push our product and research teams when the market calls for it, and move quickly with partners and internal teams.

Technical fluency is central to this role. Our counterparts are CTOs, heads of AI, and product leaders who want to know how a model performs on their hardware, where it falls short, and what it takes to ship. You need to be able to drive external conversations credibly, work alongside our engineers on evaluations and deployments, and bring what you learn back into our model and product roadmap.

You will work directly with the founders and business leadership. This role suits someone who wants to build the playbook while closing first-of-a-kind deals.

Responsibilities

- Own deals end to end, from identifying and prioritizing prospects and partners through negotiation, close, and delivery. You are accountable for the revenue.

- Source opportunities in our priority verticals through your network and outreach.

- Negotiate first-of-a-kind agreements that combine licensing, revenue sharing, co-development, and roadmap commitments.

- Lead technical conversations with CTOs and heads of AI, and work with our engineers on technical deep-dives, proofs of concept, benchmarks, and deployment planning.

- Be the voice of the market internally. Bring back objections, competitive intelligence, pricing feedback, and emerging use cases that should influence our product, model roadmap, and positioning.

- Build our GTM engine. Define how we evaluate and qualify partners, shape our external messaging, and develop the infrastructure and operating cadences that will let our team and business scale.

Desired Experience

- 10+ years in strategic business development or partnerships at technology companies, with a record of deals that moved revenue.

- Recent deal experience in AI/ML infrastructure, foundation models, developer platforms, or other technically deep products.

- High technical fluency. You understand what foundation models can do and how that translates into products and partner deployments, and you can work credibly with product and engineering leaders on both sides of the table.

- Demonstrated success structuring and personally negotiating complex commercial and technical agreements with senior executives, including multi-year deals with interlocking terms, often several at once.

- Experience leading cross-functional teams across Product, Engineering, Legal, and Finance to bring an agreement from structuring through signature and delivery.

- A record of sourcing your own opportunities, not just converting ones handed to you.

- Experience at an early-stage or growth-stage company where you helped build the motion rather than run an established one.

What We Offer

- Compensation: Competitive base salary + variable compensation with equity in a unicorn-stage company

- Health: We pay 100% of medical, dental, and vision premiums for employees and dependents

- Financial: 401(k) matching up to 4% of base pay

- Time Off: Unlimited PTO plus company-wide Refill Days throughout the year