Business Development

About the role

This role is a senior individual contributor position focused on acting as a closer who thrives with a high degree of autonomy and ownership. The hire will be the primary business lead responsible for the full lifecycle of revenue generation with top global model laboratories and enterprise accounts. They will navigate complex technical stakeholders and translate their needs into structured, seven-figure contracts that drive sustainable growth. The position requires deep embedding of Arena's evaluation infrastructure into the real-world workflows of advanced AI companies to ensure adoption at scale. Success is defined by consistently exceeding annual revenue and consumption targets through strategic account expansion and retention. The hire will also secure and leverage co-release and marketing rights to reinforce LMArena's position as the industry standard in model evaluation.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Serve as the primary business lead for strategic Model Lab Relationships, managing engagements from initial research collaboration through large-scale procurement.
• Drive Revenue Expansion across multiple evaluation modalities including text, code, multimodal, vision, and auto-eval by aligning programs with training and research roadmaps.
• Identify and close Strategic Enterprise Expansion opportunities with high-value customers such as Salesforce, IBM, and ServiceNow for internal model evaluation needs.
• Negotiate Co-release and Marketing Rights for every major lab partnership to ensure sustained mindshare and brand positioning in the market.
• Own the full Lifecycle Management of customer engagements, overseeing contract renewals, upsells, and multi-quarter expansion commitments.
• Maintain rigorous Pipeline Hygiene by aligning revenue forecasts with delivery schedules, consumption pacing, and renewal cycles to ensure predictability.
• Design and enforce sophisticated Deal Architecture that balances predictable committed contracts with flexible usage-based consumption models.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Delivery and Product teams to guarantee evaluation capacity, quality, and timing meet or exceed customer expectations.
• Lead the Go-to-Market strategy for new Eval or Data Products, defining positioning and sales approaches for both existing and new relationships.
• Act as the primary technical and commercial liaison for complex RFPs, responding with precise, evaluation-focused solutions that reflect deep product understanding.
• Translate qualitative feedback from human-centric evaluations into quantifiable product and roadmap insights for the research and engineering teams.
• Partner with Finance to model scenario-based revenue outcomes and ensure that all deals remain profitable and operationally executable.
• Represent Arena at industry conferences, workshops, and lab steering committees to reinforce thought leadership and visibility.
• Establish and monitor a robust set of key performance indicators for account health, pipeline conversion, and net revenue retention.
• Mentor junior business development colleagues by sharing playbooks, deal reviews, and best practices for closing sophisticated AI infrastructure deals.

Requirements

• Bring 10+ Years of Business Development or Sales experience with a proven track record of selling complex technical infrastructure or data products.
• Demonstrate a history of personally closing seven-figure deals while comfortably navigating procurement processes at large organizations.
• Show AI Fluency by having ideally worked in the AI domain and understanding the stack, including Training versus Inference, RLHF, and Benchmarking.
• Operate with high Agency as a self-starter who can manage their own pipeline, forecasting, and deal hygiene without reliance on a prescribed playbook.
• Exhibit Operational Rigor by aligning sales commitments with delivery realities, working closely with finance and product to ensure profitability.
• Communicate at an advanced level with researchers and scientists to discuss model performance needs, evaluation design, and technical tradeoffs.
• Maintain strict integrity in handling confidential information and competitive deal dynamics across global enterprises and labs.
• Thrive in a fast-paced, mission-driven environment where decisions must be made quickly and executed with precision.
• Embrace a culture of transparency, curiosity, and craftsmanship that values impact over hierarchy and bureaucracy.
• Commit to working within the Bay Area location and full-time schedule to ensure close collaboration with the distributed team.

Nice to have

• Experience selling evaluation, benchmarking, or data labeling platforms to AI labs or enterprise customers.
• Familiarity with co-marketing arrangements and revenue-sharing models in the AI tooling landscape.
• Background in managing academic or open-source partnerships that transition into commercial engagements.

Practical notes

• This role is based in the Bay Area and requires full-time on-site engagement.
• Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship for this position.
• The position does not have a published compensation range listed on the page.