EMEA AI Startup & VC Growth Director

Coreweaveu; Greater London; On-site; GBP 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Living Wage accreditation

Job summary

CoreWeave is seeking a Senior Director, Startup Business Development – EMEA to lead the regional startup ecosystem strategy, build key partnerships, and drive adoption of AI infrastructure across the UK, Europe and Israel. You will partner with sales, product and engineering to convert opportunities, hire and mentor a regional team, and define programmes that accelerate startup and VC engagement.

Based in the UK with regular travel across EMEA, you will shape the startup go-to-market, establish

Qualifications

• 15+ years of experience in business development, sales, partnerships, startup go-to-market or venture ecosystem leadership within cloud infrastructure, enterprise technology, AI.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute CoreWeave’s EMEA startup business development strategy, operating plan and investment priorities.
• Build a systematic view of the regional startup opportunity, identifying markets, investor portfolios, technology categories and companies most likely to become significant consumers of AI infrastructure.
• Establish clear criteria for prioritising startups based on technical ambition, compute intensity, funding trajectory, workload timing, leadership quality and strategic value.
• Build senior relationships with venture capital firms, seed and growth investors, accelerators, universities, research laboratories and founder communities.
• Develop strategic engagement plans for priority ecosystem organisations and create repeatable mechanisms for portfolio introductions, founder support, technical engagement and market intelligence.
• Position CoreWeave as the preferred AI infrastructure and developer platform for companies with meaningful training, fine‑tuning, inference and applied‑intelligence requirements.
• Engage founders, CTOs, researchers and investors before infrastructure architectures and platform relationships are firmly established.
• Create qualified opportunities and introductions for country Startup and Digital Native field teams, connecting high‑potential companies rapidly to the right sellers, technical resources and executive sponsors.
• Partner with country sales leaders to define target companies, ecosystem priorities and engagement strategies while maintaining clear account ownership.
• Coordinate strategically important opportunities across Sales, Field Engineering, Product, Engineering, Capacity, Finance, Legal, Marketing and Customer Success.
• Establish clear programme eligibility, investment and graduation criteria, ensuring activity is focused on durable platform adoption and commercial potential.
• Act as the regional voice of the startup ecosystem inside CoreWeave, translating market insight into recommendations for Product, Engineering, Capacity, Marketing and commercial leadership.
• Build, lead and develop a high-performing EMEA Startup Business Development team with complementary programme and geographic coverage.
• Establish a rigorous operating cadence and scorecard covering ecosystem coverage, target‑company engagement, field acceptance, sourced and influenced pipeline, technical activation, consumption and downstream commercial impact.

Skills

EMEA market leadership

Startup ecosystem partnerships

Cloud infrastructure knowledge

Strategic account development

Team leadership

Job description

CoreWeave is seeking a Senior Director, Startup Business Development – EMEA to lead the regional startup ecosystem strategy, build key partnerships, and drive adoption of AI infrastructure across the UK, Europe and Israel. You will partner with sales, product and engineering to convert opportunities, hire and mentor a regional team, and define programmes that accelerate startup and VC engagement.

Based in the UK with regular travel across EMEA, you will shape the startup go-to-market, establish