Principal Business Development Lead

What if your business development experience could help advance cancer research , model climate impacts , or combat human trafficking , instead of chasing incremental deals or selling pre-packaged solutions? 

At Kitware , you won't be selling a fixed product or following someone else's roadmap. You'll work directly with engineers and researchers to identify opportunities, shape what gets built, and turn real-world problems into funded, high-impact technical work. That might mean shaping an AI-driven medical imaging platform, a large-scale scientific data system, or a geospatial analytics capability that doesn’t exist yet. 

Kitware advances science and makes the world a better place through open-source software. We collaborate with top universities, national laboratories, government agencies, and commercial technology leaders to develop both cutting-edge research prototypes and production systems with outsized real-world impact. Our tools are used by millions, including CMake, a widely used tool in C++ development.

We're a 100% employee-owned company (ESOP) with no outside investors and about 200 employees. Our leadership has a technical background, and there's no middle management layer between you and the problems you're solving. We're not chasing VC rounds or seeking an exit. We're building software that will matter for decades.

If you're looking to move beyond traditional business development and want a role where you'll influence what gets built, which markets we pursue, and how our Software & Data Solutions portfolio evolves, we'd love to talk. 

About the Software & Data Solutions (SDS) Team

Our mission: We connect people with their data through applications and tools that help scientists, analysts, and researchers achieve maximum reach and impact. Our projects range from large-scale data management platforms to custom visualization tools to open-source libraries used across the scientific community. Our team is roughly 40 engineers, and most projects are generally staffed with two to eight people.

Values that guide us

Staff empowerment. We trust people to make decisions, engage customers directly, and take ownership without micromanagement.

Pursuit of passions. We value curiosity and an entrepreneurial mindset. We look for opportunities where our technical strengths, customer needs, and meaningful problems meet.

Solutions over software. We choose technologies based on the problem, not the other way around, and focus on sustainable solutions that make our customers successful.

Focus on the important. We tackle the most pressing and important problems, not just those that are the easiest to solve or most politically palatable. We share the same objectives and we use a free exchange of ideas to find the best solutions.

The work we pursue

There is a lot that we're building at Kitware. Here are some examples that give a sense of the problems we tackle:

• Data management and analysis platforms: Building web applications that help researchers and analysts manage, query, and derive insight from complex and unique datasets across domains like health care, geospatial intelligence, and climate science.

• Domain-specific applications: Building custom applications for collaborators, including national labs, universities, medical device manufacturers, and government agencies, for web and mobile platforms.

• Interactive data visualization: Creating browser-based tools that make large-scale scientific data explorable and understandable, from medical imaging to environmental modeling.

• Open-source libraries and tools: Extending and maintaining Kitware's portfolio of widely used open-source projects, improving their web integrations and developer experience.