Director of Business Development

Director of Business Development

Business Development Berkeley, CA Full-time

You will be Opticore's first commercial hire and the person who gets us in front of the right buyers. Our photonic AI inference chips are being built for the data center, hyperscaler, AI cloud, and high-performance computing markets, and the most important thing you bring is the ability to pick up the phone and reach the person who actually makes compute infrastructure decisions at those organizations. This is a pipeline-first role. The immediate job is identifying target accounts, navigating to the right technical and business stakeholders, and securing early pilot engagements that prove out the technology in real customer environments. Over time, you will build and lead Opticore's sales and business development organization.

Key Responsibilities

• Map the buying landscape across hyperscalers, AI-native cloud providers, national labs, DoD HPC programs, and Tier 1 data center operators, and identify the right point of contact at each
• Build and own Opticore's early commercial pipeline: outreach, relationships, pilot structuring, and follow-through
• Lead customer conversations, translating Opticore's photonic computing capabilities into concrete value for infrastructure and AI compute buyers
• Structure and negotiate early partnership, evaluation, and pilot agreements
• Feed customer requirements and market signals back to the engineering and product teams to inform the hardware roadmap
• Represent Opticore at industry events, conferences, and in the broader AI compute ecosystem
• Hire and build the sales and business development team as Opticore scales toward commercialization

Minimum Requirements

• Deep, active network across the data center, AI compute, HPC, or supercomputing ecosystem, with the ability to quickly identify and reach the right decision-maker at a target account
• Demonstrated track record of building commercial pipeline from scratch at an early-stage hardware, semiconductor, or AI infrastructure company
• Experience navigating long enterprise procurement and partnership cycles, including pilot and evaluation agreements
• Ability to hold a substantive technical conversation about AI inference infrastructure, compute architecture, or data center hardware, enough to be credible with infrastructure and chip architects
• Comfortable operating as a sole contributor before a team exists, then transitioning into building and leading that team

Even Better If You Have

• Prior experience selling to or partnering with hyperscalers (AWS, Azure, GCP, Meta) or AI-native cloud providers (CoreWeave, Lambda Labs, etc.)
• Relationships at national labs or DoD HPC programs (LLNL, Argonne, AFRL, etc.)
• Background in semiconductor, photonics, or AI hardware companies
• Experience as a first commercial hire at a deep tech or hardware startup

We're reviewing applications on a rolling basis and will reach out to shortlisted candidates.