Strategic Business Development, Startups Lead

The Opportunity

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.

What We're Looking for

We need someone who

• Learns fast: You get up to speed on a new product, customer, or market quickly, and you rarely need something explained twice. We ship frequently; you learn each release from the docs and the engineers who built it, then explain it accurately to customers.
• Moves from idea to live: You turn an idea for an offer or a program into something customers can use, document just enough to make it repeatable, and refine it as results come in, rather than waiting on a finished strategy document.
• Keeps founder pace: You work the way startups do: you respond quickly on whatever channel a founder prefers, move from first conversation to signed deal in days or weeks, and run deals yourself rather than through a team.

The Work

• Own startup revenue: qualify and close inbound demand, grow accounts as customers move into production, and take new offerings to startups as our platform expands.
• Build outbound alongside a strong inbound flow, using hackathons, developer communities, and VC and accelerator relationships to find the startups that should be building on Liquid.
• Design and run our startup program: who qualifies, what they get (credits, community, access to our team), and how they move to paid usage, with economics that work for Liquid.
• Create commercial offers that make deals repeatable, such as committed-spend agreements backed by dedicated capacity, and sell them.
• Turn customer feedback into product improvements: bring friction in billing, limits, documentation, and missing features to engineering as clear, prioritized requests, and follow them through to release.

What you'll need

• 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.

Helpful, not required

• 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.

What Success Looks Like (Year One)

• 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.

What We Offer

• Write the playbook: You'll decide how Liquid wins and serves startups, from the program to the deals, and shape the product directly with the engineers who build it.
• Compensation & Equity: Competitive base salary plus equity, so you share in what we build. Final offers reflect skills, experience, and location.
• Time Off: Unlimited PTO, plus company-wide Refill Days, long weekends when the whole company rests together.
• Health & Wellbeing: Comprehensive health coverage, with details varying by location.
• Paid Leave: Paid leave for pregnancy, parenting, medical needs, and caring for family.