Business Development Lead

About the role

This position is for an individual contributor focused on identifying and fostering relationships with key AI-native startups. You will help these high-potential companies build on Snowflake's platform and increase their use of Snowflake AI products. This role requires a blend of startup ecosystem insight, business acumen, and technical understanding of modern AI architectures.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Cultivate relationships with important AI-native startups, their founders, venture investors, and other ecosystem participants.
• Create and implement a market strategy for startups to boost their use of Snowflake, with a strong focus on AI products.
• Offer insights into AI-native startup trends, including model use, data infrastructure, agentic workflows, and enterprise adoption.
• Guide founders on how to develop and scale AI applications using Snowflake's capabilities, such as Cortex AI, Cortex Agents, Cortex Search, Document AI, and Snowpark ML.
• Collaborate with Sales, Solutions Engineering, Product, Marketing, AI Partnerships, and Snowflake Ventures to coordinate startup acquisition and growth.
• Design repeatable programs and engagements to increase the startup pipeline, product adoption, and workload growth.
• Evaluate the startup landscape to prioritize opportunities based on strategic fit, technical relevance, market momentum, and potential for long-term Snowflake consumption.
• Monitor business results, share market insights, and provide recommendations to refine strategy and execution.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in business development, partnerships, startup programs, venture capital, go-to-market strategy, cloud computing, or AI/ML.
• Experience engaging with high-growth startups, including working directly with founders and executing cross-functional partnerships.
• Strong knowledge of the modern AI stack, including LLM-powered applications, retrieval-augmented generation, agents, model serving, and data infrastructure.
• Ability to translate technical platform features into clear business value for founders, developers, and executives.
• Proven track record of developing partnership strategies, scaling programs, and achieving measurable business outcomes.
• Excellent communication, relationship-building, and stakeholder management skills at an executive level.
• Comfort operating in uncertain environments, shifting between strategy and execution, and prioritizing in a rapidly changing market.
• Data-driven approach to operations, using metrics to assess opportunities, influence decisions, and improve performance.

Nice to have

• Experience within the AI-native startup ecosystem as a founder, operator, investor, or partnership leader.
• Familiarity with enterprise AI application patterns like RAG, agent orchestration, tool use, evaluation, governance, and model optimization.
• Working knowledge of the Snowflake AI stack, specifically Cortex AI, Cortex Agents, Cortex Search, Document AI, Snowpark ML, and AI Data Cloud adoption.
• Experience assisting technical startups with refining their enterprise positioning, go-to-market strategies, and customer adoption plans.

Skills & tools

• AI/ML
• LLM-powered applications
• Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
• Agent orchestration
• Model serving
• Data infrastructure
• Snowflake AI (Cortex AI, Cortex Agents, Cortex Search, Document AI, Snowpark ML)

Practical notes

This role reports to the Head of Snowflake Startups. All employees must adhere to Snowflake's confidentiality and security standards for handling sensitive data.

About the company

Snowflake is an enterprise shaped by the principles of structure, variety, and natural development. An individual Snowflake starts as a single ice crystal with enough mass to fall through the atmosphere of the Earth as snow. Even though snow consists of clear ice, it appears white in color. This happens because the numerous small facets on the crystals scatter sunlight among themselves. Every flake forms around a tiny central particle called a nucleus. It accumulates water droplets that freeze and gradually construct a crystal. Intricate patterns develop as the structure travels through varying zones of humidity and temperature. A flake may also join together with other snowflakes along its path. Due to these changing conditions, individual flakes usually look quite distinct from one another. Still, scientists group them into eight main classifications and identify no fewer than eighty separate variants. The primary structural shapes of ice crystals are the base or plate, needle, column, and rime. These foundational forms combine to generate diverse final structures. At Snowflake, we value how small beginnings evolve into unique, highly structured forms. Our team works together to analyze these diverse patterns and understand how distinct individual components combine to build complete, functional systems. We bring these core principles to everything we create.