Business Development

Sieve, Inc.; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) and full health insurance

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner provided

Onsite in San Francisco 5 days a week

Job summary

Sieve, Inc. is seeking the first business development hire to build deep relationships with frontier AI labs and model companies from our San Francisco headquarters. You’ll identify opportunities, shape conversations, and drive inbound demand with programs and partnerships.

Reporting to the CEO, you’ll coordinate with GMs and the COO to map buying centers, engage stakeholders, and drive high‑value deals while aligning Sieve’s data offerings with AI industry needs.

Qualifications

• Deep familiarity with frontier AI labs and the AI data ecosystem.
• Experience in strategic business development, partnerships, or similar roles in AI.
• Strong understanding of how foundation models are trained and evaluated.
• Ability to communicate effectively with researchers, founders, executives, and commercial stakeholders.
• Proven ability to identify high-value opportunities and drive cross-functional execution.

Responsibilities

• Build trusted relationships with researchers, data leaders, product teams, and executives at frontier AI labs and emerging model companies.
• Identify and engage new labs and expand relationships inside existing customers.
• Map organizations and leaders across models, modalities, capabilities, and data needs.
• Stay close to model training and evaluation changes to spot data needs.
• Develop clear opportunity theses linking research priorities to Sieve's data and infrastructure.

Skills

Frontier AI network

Strategic relationship-building

Executive communication

Zero-to-one initiatives

Job description

About Us

Sieve is a multi-modal lab curating the world's highest-quality training datasets — spanning video, audio, images, text, and 3D. We combine exabyte-scale data infrastructure and novel multimodal understanding techniques that push the frontier of foundation models. Video alone makes up 80% of internet traffic, and across modalities, data has become the enabling medium powering creativity, communication, gaming, AR/VR, and robotics. Sieve exists to solve the biggest bottleneck in the growth of these applications: high-quality training data.

We partner with top AI labs and did $XXM last quarter alone, as a team of ~30 people. We also raised our Series A from Tier 1 firms such as Matrix Partners, Swift Ventures, Y Combinator, and AI Grant.

Why Now

Sieve is one of the most capital-efficient teams in AI — roughly 30 people serving the world's leading AI labs across every major data modality. You'll join early, own problems end-to-end, and watch your work ship directly into the models defining the frontier.

About the Role

As the first business development person, you'll build and deepen relationships across frontier AI labs, emerging model companies, and the broader data ecosystem. You'll identify new labs to work with, develop relationships with additional groups inside existing customers, and recognize emerging opportunities where Sieve can help.

You'll report directly to the CEO and work closely with our GMs and COO. Your job is to find the right people, create high-value conversations, shape opportunities early, and pull the right internal and external levers to help them progress. Our GMs will own commercial scoping, pricing, and closing.

You'll also own the near-term strategy and execution for programs that create inbound demand, including events, conferences, ecosystem partnerships, and marketing initiatives.

What You'll Do

• Build trusted relationships with researchers, data leaders, product teams, and executives at frontier AI labs and emerging model companies

• Identify and engage new labs while opening relationships with additional teams and buying centers inside existing customers

• Map the organizations that matter: understand who is working on which models, modalities, capabilities, and data problems

• Stay close to changes in model training, post-training, evaluations, RL environments, and multimodal research to recognize where new data needs are emerging

• Develop clear opportunity theses that connect a lab's research priorities or model limitations to Sieve's data and infrastructure capabilities

• Create and facilitate high-value conversations between external stakeholders and the appropriate Sieve GM

• Prepare internal teams with the context they need, including stakeholder maps, research priorities, customer needs, relevant Sieve capabilities, and recommended next steps

• Remain involved after the initial introduction, using relationships, follow-ups, references, events, executive engagement, and other strategic levers to help opportunities progress

• Work with the CEO, GMs, and COO to prioritize the relationships and opportunities that matter most

• Own the strategy and execution for selective programs that generate inbound demand, including executive dinners, research events, conference presence, ecosystem partnerships, content, and other creative initiatives

• Represent Sieve at industry events and in the communities where AI researchers, data leaders, founders, and investors spend time

• Build a strong view of the AI data market, including emerging customer needs, competitor activity, organizational changes at labs, and new categories Sieve should pursue

• Maintain a clear, lightweight system for tracking important relationships, active opportunities, and next steps

Requirements

• Deep familiarity with the frontier AI lab and AI data ecosystem, with an existing network or demonstrated ability to build trusted relationships within it

• Experience in strategic business development, partnerships, investing, company-building, or another relationship-driven role in AI

• Strong understanding of how foundation models are trained and improved, including the role of pretraining, post-training, evaluations, human data, multimodal data, and RL environments

• The technical judgment to understand what makes data useful for training and to hold credible conversations with AI researchers and technical leaders

• Exceptional relationship-building skills and the judgment to know which people, organizations, and opportunities matter

• Ability to communicate fluently with researchers, founders, executives, operators, and commercial stakeholders

• High agency and comfort personally executing across relationship development, events, marketing, and other zero-to-one initiatives

• Strong organizational judgment and the ability to manage many long‑term relationships

• In-person at our San Francisco HQ

Nice to Have

• Experience at a human‑data, training‑data, evaluation, or AI infrastructure company

• Direct experience scoping or executing data engagements with frontier AI labs

• Previous experience working at a frontier lab, founding an AI company, or investing in the AI and data ecosystem

• Existing relationships across research, data, post‑training, evaluations, procurement, and executive teams at major AI labs

• Experience with multimodal data, reinforcement learning environments, human feedback, red teaming, or model evaluations

• Experience building executive events, ecosystem programs, strategic content, or other inbound‑demand initiatives from scratch

• Technical or research experience beyond the level required to sell or manage partnerships

Benefits

• 401(k) and full health insurance

• Breakfast, lunch, and dinner covered, plus your choice of snacks

• Ubers covered home
  *all roles at Sieve require you to be onsite in San Francisco 5 days per week