Strategic BD - Business Development (AI Infra & Inference)

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

Job summary

OrcaRouter is seeking a full-time Strategic BD professional based in the San Francisco Bay Area to identify, qualify, and close strategic partnerships and customer relationships across AI-native startups, enterprise AI teams, and infrastructure partners.

You will source leads, conduct market research, and collaborate with product and engineering teams to align offerings with customer needs. Represent OrcaRouter at industry events and help shape go-to-market strategy for AI inference products.

Qualifications

• Strong analytical skills to evaluate opportunities, data-driven business cases.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, with ability to present to diverse stakeholders.
• Lead generation, pipeline management, and using CRM to track deals.
• Market research across AI infrastructure trends and customer segments.

Responsibilities

• Source and manage a pipeline of strategic leads and partnerships.
• Qualify opportunities and move deals through a CRM-based pipeline.
• Do market and competitive research to shape offerings.
• Collaborate with product, engineering, and marketing to align customer needs.

Skills

Analytical skills

Communication skills

Lead generation

Market research

Customer service

B2B SaaS knowledge

APIs familiarity

Tools

CRM tools

APIs

Job description

Company Description

OrcaRouter is a unified AI inference gateway and open AI infrastructure platform that gives developers a single API key to access 200+ models across providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, and xAI. The platform offers adaptive routing, fallback, unified billing, bring-your-own-key (BYOK), and zero markup, while supporting both OpenAI-compatible APIs and native Anthropic and Gemini endpoints. In addition to the hosted gateway, OrcaRouter builds in the open, releasing self-hosted routing infrastructure, MCP tooling, SDK integrations, and open-weight models and research. The company maintains an active presence across X, Hugging Face, Ollama, GitHub, arXiv, and detailed product documentation, making it a highly visible player in the AI infrastructure ecosystem. This environment is ideal for individuals who want to help shape the future of AI inference and developer tooling.

Role Description

This is a full-time, on-site Strategic BD – Business Development role based in the San Francisco Bay Area. The role focuses on identifying, qualifying, and closing strategic partnerships and customer relationships across AI-native startups, enterprise AI teams, and infrastructure partners. Day-to-day responsibilities include sourcing and managing a pipeline of leads, conducting market and competitive research, and collaborating with product and engineering teams to align offerings with customer needs. The person in this role will prepare and deliver compelling presentations and demos, negotiate commercial terms, and support customer onboarding and ongoing account growth. They will also represent OrcaRouter at industry events, gather feedback from the market, and help shape go-to-market strategy for AI inference and infrastructure products.

Qualifications

• Strong analytical skills to evaluate market opportunities, customer usage data, and partner performance, and to build data-informed business cases.
• Excellent communication skills, including clear written and verbal communication, presentation capabilities, and the ability to translate technical concepts for diverse stakeholders.
• Lead generation and pipeline management experience, including prospecting, qualifying opportunities, and using CRM tools to track and progress deals.
• Market research skills for understanding AI infrastructure trends, competitive landscape, and customer segments across startups and enterprise environments.
• Customer service and account management skills, with a focus on building long-term relationships, resolving issues, and ensuring high customer satisfaction.
• Experience in B2B SaaS, cloud infrastructure, AI platforms, or developer tools; familiarity with APIs and AI inference workflows is highly beneficial.
• Proven track record in business development, partnerships, or sales, ideally in a technical or product-led environment.
• Ability to work cross-functionally with product, engineering, and marketing teams, and to thrive in a fast