Director of Strategic Partnerships, AI

Our client is an emerging scientific AI company building proprietary data, evaluation, and training capabilities designed for some of the most technically demanding AI research applications. The organization is bringing together advanced simulation, experimental science, and machine learning to create resources that cannot simply be collected from existing public datasets. They are seeking a highly connected commercial leader who can turn these capabilities into strategic partnerships with the organizations shaping the frontier of AI.

• Competitive compensation with meaningful early-stage equity participation.
• Opportunity to build partnerships with leading AI research organizations.
• A technically differentiated offering spanning scientific data, evaluations, training environments, and model-related services.
• Close collaboration with scientists, researchers, and technical leaders working across advanced simulation and experimental disciplines.
• High ownership in an entrepreneurial environment where successful partnerships can directly shape company growth.

• Own a concentrated portfolio of strategic AI accounts and build executive and research relationships that convert technical capabilities into commercial programs.
• Open doors with leading model developers and infrastructure companies, using established relationships to secure technical discovery meetings, pilots, and long-term agreements.
• Shape partnership strategies for scientific datasets, model evaluations, training environments, expert-generated content, and controlled model access.
• Translate complex scientific capabilities into clear commercial value for research, product, procurement, and leadership stakeholders.
• Structure pilot programs and commercial agreements with clear success criteria, expansion paths, pricing logic, and account plans.
• Lead negotiations involving data rights, exclusivity, permitted use, ownership, and reuse while protecting the company's long-term intellectual property position.
• Partner closely with scientific and technical teams to align customer needs with simulation, evaluation, and experimental capabilities.
• Build the early go-to-market playbook for a high-growth scientific AI business, from target-account strategy through signed revenue.

• Proven success selling into at least one frontier AI organization, with active relationships across Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Deep Mind, Meta, Microsoft, xAI, or Nvidia.
• Ability to reach research-level contacts at major AI organizations within the first 30 days, supported by named, current relationships.
• Prior sales experience involving scientific or expert datasets, evaluations, training environments, model access, or related AI research services.
• Working knowledge of scientific simulation, including the outputs of density functional theory and molecular dynamics and the challenges of generating data under applied fields.
• Familiarity with multi-modal perturbation biology and the role experimental or simulation-derived data can play in model training and evaluation.
• Experience with an expert-data, evaluation, or environment commercialization model at organizations such as Mercor, Surge AI, Scale AI, Handshake AI, Micro1, Turing, Invisible, Snorkel, Prime Intellect, Mechanize, or a comparable company.
• Understanding of modern model improvement workflows, including post-training, reinforcement learning, verifiable rewards, benchmarks, and evaluation systems.
• Experience negotiating sophisticated data or technology agreements with substantially larger counter parties, including ownership, exclusivity, and field-of-use provisions.