Director, Deal Strategy & Acceleration

About the role

You will architect and lead Nscale's future-facing Deal Desk, a function purpose-built for the extreme complexity of hyperscale AI infrastructure transactions. This role moves far beyond standard SaaS sales operations, requiring you to master the intricacies of physical hardware, power density constraints, and liquid cooling integration within every commercial decision. You will be the primary architect of bespoke pricing models and intricate SLAs for our first marquee enterprise clients, ensuring every deal aggressively protects Nscale's margins while unlocking massive contract values. Initially, you will personally negotiate and structure these landmark agreements, transforming high-level customer requirements into executable commercial frameworks. Following this foundational work, you will codify these complex strategies into standardized playbooks and global processes. Ultimately, you will build and lead a team of elite Deal Strategists to scale this function worldwide, ensuring operational excellence and commercial rigor as we grow. This is a leadership position that demands deep financial acumen, operational discipline, and the ability to translate chaotic infrastructure constraints into clear, profitable commercial rules.

Key facts

What you'll do

Architect the commercial and financial structures for our largest, most critical initial contracts, balancing GPU consumption models, payment terms, and upfront capital commitments to maximize total contract value.

Construct the core Deal Desk processes from the ground up, establishing scalable approval matrices, SLA guardrails, discounting policies, and comprehensive negotiation playbooks for the entire sales organization.

Act as the central, authoritative liaison between Sales, Legal, Finance, and Capacity Planning to ensure creative deals are both innovative enough to outpace legacy hyperscalers and standard enough for flawless operational execution.

Develop sophisticated financial models to assess the true profitability of complex, multi-year capacity deals, ensuring the sales team fully comprehends the margin impact of every concession and variable.

Build, hire, train, and aggressively manage a global team of elite Deal Strategists who will partner directly with Account Executives on daily, high-velocity transactions, freeing you to concentrate on the top 1% of mega-deals.

Define and implement the initial quoting tools and operational workflows that form the foundation of our Deal Desk, setting the standard for efficiency and accuracy.

Partner closely with our first major enterprise clients to design bespoke pricing models and intricate service level agreements that align technological constraints with business outcomes.

Establish clear governance and risk management frameworks for all custom deal structures, ensuring compliance and protecting the company's financial health across all agreements.

Translate complex technical constraints regarding power, cooling, and hardware depreciation into clear commercial language that resonates with executive stakeholders and finance teams.

Champion a data-driven approach to deal strategy, using performance metrics to continuously refine playbooks, discounting rules, and negotiation tactics over time.

Foster a culture of collaboration and trust with Sales leadership, positioning the Deal Desk as an enabler that accelerates deal closure rather than a bottleneck that creates friction.

Maintain a deep, evolving understanding of the AI infrastructure market landscape, including competitor pricing, capacity constraints, and emerging customer demands, to ensure our commercial offerings remain competitive.

Requirements

You must possess a minimum of 8 years of deep, hands-on experience in Deal Desk, Commercial Operations, Strategic Finance, or Enterprise Sales Structuring, with the majority of that history at a major cloud provider like AWS, GCP, or Azure, or a high-growth infrastructure or hardware company.

Your expertise must include absolute mastery of complex enterprise IaaS contracting, where you fluently operate using the language of consumption-based models, reserved instances, commit drawdowns, burst capacity, and highly customized uptime SLAs.

You must demonstrate elite financial modeling skills paired with a refined, aggressive commercial instinct, knowing precisely which commercial levers to pull during negotiations to maximize deal value without compromising long-term customer relationships.

You must have a proven, collaborative, high-EQ approach to internal partnerships, where you are viewed as a trusted advisor and a true accelerator for the sales organization, finding creative paths to agreement even while enforcing strict margin requirements.

You must have direct experience building a Deal Desk function from its infancy, including implementing the initial quoting tools, defining the initial processes, and training the first cohort of strategists to execute your vision.

You must be comfortable operating in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment where technical complexity intersects with high-stakes commercial negotiations, requiring rapid iteration and decisive judgment.

You must have a strong history of working with cross-functional stakeholders to align on strategic objectives, translating technical and capacity constraints into actionable commercial decisions.

You must be willing to travel as required to engage with key enterprise clients and stakeholders in hubs such as Houston, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle.

Nice to have

Prior experience in the AI or high-performance computing (HPC) sectors, providing contextual familiarity with the specific demands and market dynamics of this rapidly evolving industry.

A background in managing hardware-intensive service offerings where power, cooling, and physical deployment constraints directly influence commercial terms.

Practical notes

This role may require travel to key locations including Houston, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle.

Candidates must be eligible to work in the United States without sponsorship for this position.