Startup Business Development Lead - Snowflake for Startups

At Snowflake, we are powering the era of the agentic enterprise. To usher in this new era, we seek AI-native thinkers across every function who are energized by the opportunity to reinvent how they work. You don’t just use tools; you possess an innate curiosity, treating AI as a high-trust collaborator that is core to how you solve problems and accelerate your impact. We look for low-ego individuals who thrive in dynamic and fast-moving environments and move with an experimental mindset — who rapidly test emerging capabilities to discover simpler, more powerful ways to deliver results. At Snowflake, your role isn't just to execute a function, but to help redefine the future of how work gets done. The Business Development Lead for Snowflake for Startups will be a pivotal member of a small, agile, and global team. This role acts as a coordination overlay across Sales, Marketing, and Solutions Engineering (SE) teams, with the primary goal of targeting and winning workloads from top AI startups. The successful candidate will be a strategic thinker with a passion for the AI/ML ecosystem, dedicated to identifying and nurturing high-potential AI-native startups and ensuring their growth with Snowflake. This role requires a proactive approach to engagement, a keen ability to prioritize, and a commitment to measurable results. Key Responsibilities: Driving Engagement and Introductions to New, High-Priority AI-Native Startups: Network and Personal Introductions: Leverage existing networks and cultivate new relationships to secure introductions to founders of AI-native startups. Events and Networking: Actively participate in industry events, conferences, and networking opportunities to identify and engage with promising startups. Event Sponsorship: Identify and recommend key events for sponsorship to enhance Snowflake's visibility and generate leads within the AI startup community. Content Production: Contribute to the creation and dissemination of valuable content, such as workshops and PR initiatives, to attract and inform AI startups about Snowflake's offerings. Categorizing and Maintaining a High-Priority Startup List: Tiered Prioritization: Develop and maintain a meticulously categorized list of high-priority startups, classifying them into Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 based on strategic importance, growth potential, and alignment with Snowflake's objectives. Market Intelligence: Continuously monitor the venture funding landscape and key product trends within the AI startup ecosystem to inform and refine startup prioritization. Cross-functional Alignment: Collaborate with internal teams (Sales, Marketing, Product, AI Partnerships, Venture) to ensure a unified approach to outreach and engagement with prioritized startups. Driving Growth and Results from Tier 1 and Tier 2 Startups: Focused Engagement: Allocate time strategically, dedicating approximately 60% of efforts to Tier 1 startups, 20% to Tier 2 startups, and 20% to other high-potential opportunities. Executive Leadership Introductions: Facilitate introductions between Tier 1 startup founders and Snowflake's Executive Leadership Team (ELT) to foster deeper relationships and demonstrate Snowflake's commitment. GTM Support: Provide comprehensive go-to-market (GTM) support, leveraging Snowflake's enterprise customer base to create a prize target for AI startups' GTM efforts. Product-Led Growth (PLG) Motion: Support the PLG motion by promoting Cortex REST APIs to attract "off Snowflake" startups and create a path for them to move additional data and workloads onto Snowflake. Partnership Development: Work to transform relationships with Foundation Model (FM) providers from transactional sales channels into genuine product partnerships, ensuring that FM partners recognize the value of AI startups consuming tokens via Cortex. Field Enablement: Collaborate with sales and solutions engineering teams to ensure they are trained on how to effectively sell FM access and token capacity, addressing unique sales cycles and consumption models preferred by startups. Measuring and Reporting on Growth and Effectiveness: Objectives and Key Results (OKRs): Define, track, and report on critical metrics to measure the effectiveness of engagement with Tier 1 and Tier 2 partners. These OKRs will include: New Startups’ spending on Snowflake (over $5K ARR) Capacity commits Growth in fundraising Percentage of newly funded, Tier 0/Tier 1 backed startups on Snowflake Percentage of startups in a specific venture fund or accelerator cohort on Snowflake Regular Reporting: Provide regular and insightful reports to management on the progress and impact of startup engagements, highlighting successes, challenges, and areas for improvement. Cross-functional Collaboration: Work with Finance and Sales Operations to ensure accurate tracking of inference deals and to align on commission structures for expanded Snowflake services. Qualifications: Proven experience in business development, partnerships, or a similar role within the AI/ML or cloud technology sector, with a focus on startups. Deep understanding of the AI startup ecosystem, venture funding trends, and key product trends. Strong network within the startup and venture capital communities. Excellent communication, presentation, and interpersonal skills. Ability to work strategically and tactically in a fast-paced, evolving environment. Demonstrated ability to drive measurable results and influence cross-functional teams. Every Snowflake employee is expected to follow the company’s confidentiality and security standards for handling sensitive data. Snowflake employees must abide by the company’s data security plan as an essential part of their duties. It is every employee's duty to keep customer information secure and confidential. Snowflake is growing fast, and we’re scaling our team to help enable and accelerate our growth. We are looking for people who share our values, challenge ordinary thinking, and push the pace of innovation while building a future for themselves and Snowflake. How do you want to make your impact? For jobs located in the United States, please visit the job posting on the Snowflake Careers Site for salary and benefits information: careers.snowflake.com