Business Development

About the Role

As the first business development person, you'll build and deepen relationships across frontier AI labs, emerging model companies, and the broader data ecosystem. You'll identify new labs to work with, develop relationships with additional groups inside existing customers, and recognize emerging opportunities where Sieve can help.

You'll report directly to the CEO and work closely with our GMs and COO. Your job is to find the right people, create high-value conversations, shape opportunities early, and pull the right internal and external levers to help them progress. Our GMs will own commercial scoping, pricing, and closing.

You'll also own the near-term strategy and execution for programs that create inbound demand, including events, conferences, ecosystem partnerships, and marketing initiatives.

What You'll Do

• Build trusted relationships with researchers, data leaders, product teams, and executives at frontier AI labs and emerging model companies
• Identify and engage new labs while opening relationships with additional teams and buying centers inside existing customers
• Map the organizations that matter: understand who is working on which models, modalities, capabilities, and data problems
• Stay close to changes in model training, post-training, evaluations, RL environments, and multimodal research to recognize where new data needs are emerging
• Develop clear opportunity theses that connect a lab's research priorities or model limitations to Sieve's data and infrastructure capabilities
• Create and facilitate high-value conversations between external stakeholders and the appropriate Sieve GM
• Prepare internal teams with the context they need, including stakeholder maps, research priorities, customer needs, relevant Sieve capabilities, and recommended next steps
• Remain involved after the initial introduction, using relationships, follow-ups, references, events, executive engagement, and other strategic levers to help opportunities progress
• Work with the CEO, GMs, and COO to prioritize the relationships and opportunities that matter most
• Own the strategy and execution for selective programs that generate inbound demand, including executive dinners, research events, conference presence, ecosystem partnerships, content, and other creative initiatives
• Represent Sieve at industry events and in the communities where AI researchers, data leaders, founders, and investors spend time
• Build a strong view of the AI data market, including emerging customer needs, competitor activity, organizational changes at labs, and new categories Sieve should pursue
• Maintain a clear, lightweight system for tracking important relationships, active opportunities, and next steps

Requirements

• Deep familiarity with the frontier AI lab and AI data ecosystem, with an existing network or demonstrated ability to build trusted relationships within it
• Experience in strategic business development, partnerships, investing, company-building, or another relationship-driven role in AI
• Strong understanding of how foundation models are trained and improved, including the role of pretraining, post-training, evaluations, human data, multimodal data, and RL environments
• The technical judgment to understand what makes data useful for training and to hold credible conversations with AI researchers and technical leaders
• Exceptional relationship-building skills and the judgment to know which people, organizations, and opportunities matter
• Ability to communicate fluently with researchers, founders, executives, operators, and commercial stakeholders
• High agency and comfort personally executing across relationship development, events, marketing, and other zero-to-one initiatives
• Strong organizational judgment and the ability to manage many long-term relationships
• In-person at our San Francisco HQ

Nice to Have

• Experience at a human-data, training-data, evaluation, or AI infrastructure company
• Direct experience scoping or executing data engagements with frontier AI labs
• Previous experience working at a frontier lab, founding an AI company, or investing in the AI and data ecosystem
• Existing relationships across research, data, post-training, evaluations, procurement, and executive teams at major AI labs
• Experience with multimodal data, reinforcement learning environments, human feedback, red teaming, or model evaluations
• Experience building executive events, ecosystem programs, strategic content, or other inbound-demand initiatives from scratch
• Technical or research experience beyond the level required to sell or manage partnerships