Description
At Snowflake, we are powering the era of the agentic enterprise. To usher in this new era, we seek AI-native thinkers across every function who are energized by the opportunity to reinvent how they work.
The Startup Business Development Lead will be a key member of the Snowflake for Startups team, responsible for identifying, engaging, and growing relationships with the most strategic AI-native startups.
Key Responsibilities
- Build and grow relationships with high-priority AI-native startups, founders, venture investors, and ecosystem partners.
- Develop and execute a startup GTM strategy to accelerate adoption of Snowflake with a heavy emphasis on Snowflakes AI products.
- Serve as a trusted voice on AI-native startup trends, including model usage, data infrastructure, agentic workflows, and enterprise adoption patterns.
- Help founders understand how to build and scale AI applications with Snowflake, including Cortex AI, Cortex Agents, Cortex Search, Document AI, Snowpark ML, and related platform capabilities.
- Partner with Sales, Solutions Engineering, Product, Marketing, AI Partnerships, and Snowflake Ventures to drive coordinated startup acquisition and expansion motions.
- Create repeatable programs, founder engagements, and ecosystem initiatives that increase startup pipeline, product adoption, and workload growth.
- Prioritize the startup landscape based on strategic fit, technical relevance, market momentum, and potential for long-term Snowflake consumption.
- Track business outcomes, surface market insights, and provide regular recommendations to improve strategy, coverage, and execution.
Basic Qualifications
- 8+ years of experience in business development, partnerships, startup programs, venture, GTM, cloud, AI/ML, or related fields.
- Experience working with high-growth startups, including founder engagement and cross-functional partnership execution.
- Strong understanding of the modern AI stack, including LLM-powered applications, retrieval-augmented generation, agents, model serving, and data infrastructure.
- Ability to translate technical platform capabilities into clear business value for founders, builders, and executive stakeholders.
- Demonstrated ability to develop partnership strategies, scale programs, and drive measurable business outcomes.
- Strong executive communication, relationship-building, and stakeholder management skills.
- High comfort operating in ambiguity, moving between strategy and execution, and prioritizing in a fast-changing market.
- Data-driven operating style with experience using metrics to evaluate opportunities, influence decisions, and improve execution.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in the AI-native startup ecosystem as a founder, operator, investor, or partner leader.
- Strong familiarity with enterprise AI application patterns such as RAG, agent orchestration, tool use, evaluation, governance, and model optimization.
- Working knowledge of the Snowflake AI stack, especially Cortex AI, Cortex Agents, Cortex Search, Document AI, Snowpark ML, and AI Data Cloud adoption patterns.
- Experience helping technical startups refine enterprise positioning, GTM motions, and customer adoption strategy.
What Success Looks Like in 12 Months
- Built trusted relationships with a high-priority set of AI-native startups, key VC firms, and ecosystem partners.
- Increased startup adoption of Snowflake AI and expanded the pipeline of AI-native workloads built on Snowflake.
- Established repeatable founder engagement and ecosystem programs that generate measurable startup pipeline and consumption growth.
- Improved internal alignment across Sales, Product, Marketing, AI Partnerships, Ventures, and Solutions Engineering around the startup strategy.
- Brought clear market intelligence and actionable recommendations on where Snowflake should invest to win with AI-native startups.