Business Development

Arena; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 320,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation & equity

Comprehensive health benefits

Cutting-edge AI work

Job summary

Arena Intelligence is seeking a senior business development professional to own the full lifecycle of revenue generation with autonomous deal closure across top global labs and enterprises. You will navigate complex stakeholders, structure impactful seven-figure contracts, and embed Arena's evaluation capabilities into major AI workflows.

You will drive pipeline hygiene, negotiate pricing, and align delivery with commitments, reporting into the Sales org.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of business development or sales in complex tech infra or data products.
• Proven track record of closing seven-figure deals with large organizations.
• Familiarity with AI stacks, training vs inference, RLHF, benchmarking.
• Self-starter with strong pipeline management and forecasting discipline.
• Ability to align delivery, finance, and product to profitable deals.

Responsibilities

• Own strategic account growth and execution across top global model labs.
• Drive revenue expansion across modalities by aligning eval programs with labs' roadmaps.
• Identify and close high-value enterprise opportunities and manage renewals/upsells.
• Negotiate pricing frameworks balancing predictability with usage-based models.
• Collaborate with Delivery and Product to ensure capacity, quality, and timing.

Skills

10+ Years BD/Sales

Proven closer

AI fluency

High agency

Operational rigor

Job description

About Arena Intelligence

Arena is the platform for evaluating how AI models perform in the real world. Founded by researchers from UC Berkeley's SkyLab, we're on a mission to measure and advance the frontier of AI for real-world use, and to build the foundation for everyone to understand, shape, and benefit from it.

Tens of millions of people use Arena each month to evaluate how frontier systems handle the work they actually do. The preferences they share power the most transparent, rigorous, and human-centered evaluations in AI. Leading AI labs, enterprises, and independent researchers rely on our work and open datasets to understand how models behave in real workflows: agentic coding, creative generation, professional productivity, and beyond. We go beyond leaderboards and decompose what human experience reveals about AI, so models advance toward the work people actually do.

We're a team of researchers, academics, builders, and creatives from UC Berkeley, Google, Stanford, and DeepMind. We seek truth, move fast, and value craftsmanship, curiosity, and impact over hierarchy. We're building a company where thoughtful, curious people from all backgrounds can do their best work together, in an office culture that radiates excellence, energy, and focus.

The Role

This is a senior individual contributor role for a closer who thrives on autonomy. You will own the full lifecycle of revenue generation—from navigating complex technical stakeholders to structuring and closing seven-figure contracts.

You will be responsible for ensuring Arena meets and exceeds its annual revenue and consumption targets by deeply embedding our evaluation infrastructure into the workflows of the world's most advanced AI companies.

Core Responsibilities

Strategic Account Growth & Execution

• Own the Model Lab Relationships: Serve as the primary business lead for top global model labs, managing the relationship from research lead to procurement.

• Drive Revenue Expansion: Expand revenue across modalities (text, code, multimodal, vision, auto-eval) by aggressively aligning our eval programs with each lab’s training and research roadmaps.

• Strategic Enterprise Expansion: Identify and close select opportunities to bring LMArena’s eval capabilities to high-value enterprise accounts (e.g., Salesforce, IBM, ServiceNow) seeking to evaluate internal or vendor models.

• Secure Market Presence: Negotiate co-release and marketing rights for every major lab partnership to ensure LMArena retains mindshare as the industry standard.

• Lifecycle Management: Own contract renewals, upsells, and expansions, ensuring forward visibility into multi-quarter revenue commitments.

Forecasting, Deal Structuring & Strategy

• Pipeline Hygiene: Maintain rigorous revenue forecasts that tie directly to delivery schedules, consumption pacing, and renewal cycles.

• Deal Architecture: Design and enforce pricing frameworks that balance predictability (committed contracts) with flexibility (usage-based consumption).

• Cross-Functional Alignment: Collaborate with Delivery and Product teams to ensure evaluation capacity, quality, and timing are aligned with customer expectations.

• New Product GTM: Ramp up on net new Eval or Data Products and build the strategy to sell them into existing and net new relationships.

What We Look For

• 10+ Years of Business Development / Sales: You have a proven track record of selling complex technical infrastructure or data products as a top-performing individual contributor.

• Proven Closer: You have a history of personally closing seven-figure deals. You are comfortable navigating procurement at large organizations and negotiating complex terms without hand-holding.

• AI Fluency: You have ideally worked in AI and understand the stack (Training vs. Inference, RLHF, Benchmarking). You can credible discuss model performance needs with research scientists.

• High Agency: You are a self-starter who can operate without a playbook. You effectively manage your own pipeline, forecasting, and deal hygiene.

• Operational Rigor: You understand how to align sales promises with delivery reality, working closely with finance and product to ensure deals are profitable and executable

What we offer

• We offer competitive compensation and equity aligned to the markets where our team members are based. The base salary range will depend on the candidate’s permanent work location.

• Comprehensive health and wellness benefits, including medical, dental, vision, and additional support programs.

• The opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI with a small, mission-driven team

• A culture that values transparency, trust, and community impact

Come help build the space where anyone can explore and help shape the future of AI.

Arena Intelligence provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. We are committed to a diverse and inclusive workforce and welcome people from all backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and abilities.