Startup Business Development Lead - Snowflake for Startups

The role

The Startup Business Development Lead will identify, engage, and grow relationships with strategic AI-native startups. This individual contributor will build a pipeline of opportunities, increase adoption of Snowflake AI products, and drive long-term consumption growth.

What you will do

• Build and grow relationships with high-priority AI-native startups, founders, venture investors, and ecosystem partners.
• Develop and execute a startup GTM strategy to accelerate adoption of Snowflake with a heavy emphasis on Snowflakes AI products.
• Serve as a trusted voice on AI-native startup trends.
• Help founders understand how to build and scale AI applications with Snowflake.
• Partner with Sales, Solutions Engineering, Product, Marketing, AI Partnerships, and Snowflake Ventures.
• Create repeatable programs, founder engagements, and ecosystem initiatives.
• Prioritize the startup landscape based on strategic fit, technical relevance, market momentum, and potential for long-term Snowflake consumption.
• Track business outcomes, surface market insights, and provide regular recommendations.

Required qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in business development, partnerships, startup programs, venture, GTM, cloud, AI/ML, or related fields.
• Experience working with high-growth startups, including founder engagement and cross-functional partnership execution.
• Strong understanding of the modern AI stack, including LLM-powered applications, retrieval-augmented generation, agents, model serving, and data infrastructure.
• Ability to translate technical platform capabilities into clear business value for founders, builders, and executive stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to develop partnership strategies, scale programs, and drive measurable business outcomes.
• Strong executive communication, relationship-building, and stakeholder management skills.
• High comfort operating in ambiguity, moving between strategy and execution, and prioritizing in a fast-changing market.
• Data-driven operating style with experience using metrics to evaluate opportunities, influence decisions, and improve execution.

Nice to have

• Experience in the AI-native startup ecosystem as a founder, operator, investor, or partner leader.
• Strong familiarity with enterprise AI application patterns such as RAG, agent orchestration, tool use, evaluation, governance, and model optimization.
• Working knowledge of the Snowflake AI stack, especially Cortex AI, Cortex Agents, Cortex Search, Document AI, Snowpark ML, and AI Data Cloud adoption patterns.
• Experience helping technical startups refine enterprise positioning, GTM motions, and customer adoption strategy.

About the company

Snowflake is powering the era of the agentic enterprise. The company seeks AI-native thinkers to help redefine the future of how work gets done.