Startup Growth & Partnerships Lead

Liquid AI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Write the playbook

Equity

Unlimited PTO

Health coverage

Paid leave

Job summary

Liquid AI in San Francisco and New York is seeking a Strategic Business Development, Startups Lead to drive startup revenue and shape our startup program.

You will design offers, close deals with founders, partner with engineers and marketing, and build scalable processes for onboarding startups to our platform.

This role requires a fast learner, founder-style pace, and the ability to translate early feedback into product improvements.

Qualifications

• Sharp commercial judgment and ability to design an offer or deal structure with economics.
• Track record of selling directly to startups and closing deals with founders and technical teams.
• Experience selling a technical platform (cloud, data, or AI infrastructure) that customers build on.
• Enough technical fluency to discuss models, APIs, latency, and cost with engineers.

Responsibilities

• Own startup revenue: qualify and close inbound demand, grow accounts as customers move into production, and take new offerings to startups as our platform expands.
• Build outbound alongside a strong inbound flow, using hackathons, developer communities, and VC/accelerator relationships to find startups building on Liquid.
• Design and run our startup program: who qualifies, what they get (credits, community, access to our team), and how they move to paid usage with scalable economics.
• Create commercial offers that make deals repeatable, such as committed-spend agreements backed by dedicated capacity, and sell them.
• Turn customer feedback into product improvements: bring friction in billing, limits, documentation, and missing features to engineering as clear, prioritized requests and follow them through to release.

Skills

Learns fast

Idea-to-live

Founder pace

Job description

Liquid AI in San Francisco and New York is seeking a Strategic Business Development, Startups Lead to drive startup revenue and shape our startup program.

You will design offers, close deals with founders, partner with engineers and marketing, and build scalable processes for onboarding startups to our platform.

This role requires a fast learner, founder-style pace, and the ability to translate early feedback into product improvements.