Business Development Associate

Samba; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

Samba in London is seeking a Partnerships professional to manage origination, evaluation, negotiation, and ongoing management of complex partnerships across EMEA that monetize Samba’s data and products.

You will work with senior leadership on deals, build deal economics, term sheets, and licensing terms, while coordinating with finance, legal, privacy, product, and engineering.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Finance, Economics, or Business, or equivalent practical experience.
• 2+ years in investment banking, private equity, M&A, corporate development, consulting, or a commercial role in media/advertising tech/data.
• Strong analytical foundations: Excel proficiency and deal-economics modeling.
• Comfort with AI and using it to improve outcomes in a fast-moving AI-first company.
• Ability to synthesize complex financial information for senior leadership; strong communication.

Responsibilities

• Structure Partnerships: Origination, evaluation, structuring and execution of EMEA-focused partnerships with platforms, OEMs, advertisers, publishers, and data partners.
• Design Commercial Models: Build business cases and multi-year economics; create term sheets and decks.
• Monetize the AI Ecosystem: Identify opportunities to monetize Samba’s data with AI platforms and agents.
• Run Diligence: Conduct commercial/financial diligence and benchmark terms against alternatives.
• Negotiate and Coordinate: Negotiate license scope, IP, usage rights, pricing, SLAs, and coordinate with finance, legal, privacy, product, and engineering.
• Know the Market: Research streaming, ad tech, and AI trends; attend industry events to surface opportunities.
• Work AI-First: Apply AI tooling to research, diligence, modeling and drafting; manage partnership pipeline.

Skills

Deal structuring

Financial modeling

Negotiation

Excel

AI familiarity

Education

Bachelor's degree

Finance/Economics/Business

Tools

MS Excel

Job description

Samba connects the advertising industry. Today, a trillion dollars of media flows through platforms that don’t talk to each other, and each one measures its own results. We built the independent alternative: consented first-party data and AI that give the world’s biggest advertisers, publishers, and platforms one clear view across all of it.

The next era of advertising will run on AI agents, and those agents will need data they can trust. We’re building that foundation, and the agents that act on it. Join us and help build what the industry runs on.

About the Role

You sit at the center of Samba’s commercial partnerships function, supporting the origination, evaluation, negotiation, and ongoing management of complex partnerships, initially across EMEA, that monetize Samba’s data, products, and capabilities with third-party platforms and technologies. Working closely with senior leadership on our most commercially significant deals, you build real expertise in deal structuring, negotiation, partner economics, and data licensing, and help shape the commercial models for the AI and agentic ecosystem.

What You’ll Do

• Structure Partnerships: Support the origination, evaluation, structuring, and execution of EMEA-focused partnerships with platforms, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), advertisers, publishers, and data partners.
• Design Commercial Models: Prepare business cases and model multi-year economics for fixed, usage-based, value-exchange, or hybrid deal structures, then build partner-facing decks and term sheets.
• Monetize the AI Ecosystem: Identify and evaluate opportunities to monetize Samba’s data and capabilities with AI platforms, model developers, and agent-based products, and help develop the commercial models.
• Run Diligence: Conduct commercial and financial diligence on prospective partners, and benchmark comparable partner and vendor terms so the terms offered to Samba are tested against alternatives.
• Negotiate and Coordinate: Support negotiation of license scope, intellectual property ownership, usage rights, pricing, service levels, liability, and exit terms, coordinating with finance, legal, privacy, product, and engineering to protect Samba’s position.
• Know the Market: Research streaming, advertising technology, and AI trends to surface partners and opportunities, and build relationships through industry conferences and networking events.
• Work AI-First: Apply AI and agentic tooling to research, diligence, modeling, and drafting, and keep partnership pipeline tracking and status reporting current.

What You Bring

• Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Economics, or Business, or equivalent practical experience.
• 2+ years in investment banking, private equity, mergers and acquisitions, corporate development, consulting, or a commercial role in media, advertising technology, or data, with complex deal experience and the ability to handle difficult negotiations.
• Strong analytical foundations: Excel proficiency and the ability to build deal-economics, valuation, and returns models, plus the creativity to propose an unconventional structure and explain why it is right.
• Comfort with AI and experience using it in your own role to improve outcomes, since Samba is an AI-first company. Sector experience is not required, but the ability to learn it quickly is.
• The ability to synthesize complex financial and business information for senior leadership, with excellent written and verbal communication and experience creating executive-level presentations.
• Comfort reading a term sheet or master services agreement (MSA) and spotting what is missing or one-sided, and treating privacy and data compliance as a design consideration, not a box to tick.
• Curious and quick to learn about TV, streaming, programmatic, and AI, and highly organized: a self-starter who manages multiple workstreams with minimal supervision and travels as needed for partner meetings.

Samba is an equal opportunity employer.

Your personal information

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