Strategic Business Development

Strategic Business Development

Department: Sales

Location: North America l San Francisco, CA or Cambridge, MA

Employment Type: FullTime

Role: Strategic Business Development

Department: Sales

Location: San Francisco, Boston

Location Type: Hybrid

Employment Type: Full-time

About Liquid AI

Liquid AI is a 3-year-old foundation-model company spun out of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). We build small, efficient, and incredibly fast foundation models that can run directly on the computers all around us—phones, cars, and laptops–with no internet needed, bringing AI capabilities to 99% of global compute that exists outside of data centers today. We are scaling rapidly and need exceptional people to help us get there.

The Opportunity

We have a differentiated product, early enterprise traction, and growing customer demand. Now we are building a strategic business development team that can turn that momentum into a repeatable go-to-market motion. In this role, you will own revenue from the first conversation to the signed deal. You will work directly with the founders and business leadership. You will help define how Liquid goes to market: who we target, how we position, how we price, how we run evaluations, and how we win. This is not a role for someone who wants to inherit a mature playbook. Rather, for someone who wants to build one while closing meaningful, first of a kind deals.

The Work

• Own the full sales cycle, end to end: prospecting, outbound, discovery, technical validation, commercial negotiation, procurement, and close.

• Build and manage a high-quality pipeline across priority verticals through self-sourced outbound, your network, and qualified inbound demand.

• Sell Liquid Foundation Models to technical and executive buyers, including CTOs, VPs of Engineering, Heads of AI/ML, and product leaders.

• Lead complex, multi-threaded enterprise deals that involve technical evaluation, security review, legal, procurement, and executive alignment.

• Partner closely with engineering during technical deep-dives, proof-of-concepts, benchmarks, and deployment conversations.

• Shape pricing, packaging, and deal strategy in partnership with founders and business leadership.

• Be the voice of the market internally: bring back objections, competitive intelligence, pricing feedback, and emerging use cases that should influence product and positioning.

• Build the early sales system: qualification criteria, deal stages, messaging, objection handling, handoff processes, and the operating cadences the next hires will scale.

Desired Experience

Must-have:

• 8+ years of revenue-driving experience in tech B2B sales or partnerships, with a track record of consistently meeting or exceeding goals, especially revenue-oriented goals.

• Recent experience selling AI/ML infrastructure, developer tools, data/ML platforms, or other technically sophisticated products.

• The ability to hold credible, high-trust conversations with deeply technical buyers and executives.

• A proven track record of creating pipeline yourself, not just converting pipeline created for you.

• Experience in an early-stage or Series A-C environment where you helped build the motion, not just execute an established one.

• Comfort selling through longer, consultative enterprise cycles with multiple technical and commercial stakeholders.

• Strong judgment on where to spend time, how to prioritize accounts, and how to drive a deal forward without overplaying your hand.

Nice-to-have:

• Experience selling into consumer electronics, automotive, life sciences, or financial services.

• Familiarity with modern outbound, pipeline, and forecasting tools.

• Relationships with technical decision-makers in our target account universe.

Who You Are

• You're energized by running deals, and every deal matters.

• You are a closer, but not a transactional one. You earn trust through curiosity, rigor, and commercial sharpness.
  You are energized by technical products and technical buyers. You like learning how systems work, where they break, and what makes a solution genuinely better.

• You want founder proximity, real ownership, and a seat where your judgment changes outcomes.

• You have built in ambiguity before and know how to create structure without slowing momentum.

• You care about the craft of sales: not just winning the current deal, but understanding why it was won and how to make that repeatable.

What Success Looks Like (Year One)

• You close meaningful net-new revenue from deals you helped source and run.

• Liquid has a repeatable early enterprise sales motion, with clear qualification criteria, pricing frameworks, objection handling, and handoff processes.

• Founders and leadership rely on your judgment for deal strategy, pricing, pipeline prioritization, and market insight.

• We have a stronger understanding of where we win, why we win, and which segments and use cases should define the next phase of GTM scale.

What We Offer

• Build our commercial engine: This role shapes how Liquid AI sells, not inheriting someone else’s playbook. The work directly determines whether our technology reaches the market.

• 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