Startup Business Development Lead - Snowflake for Startups

At Snowflake, we are powering the era of the agentic enterprise. To usher in this new era, we seek AI-native thinkers across every function who are energized by the opportunity to reinvent how they work. You don’t just use tools; you possess an innate curiosity, treating AI as a high-trust collaborator that is core to how you solve problems and accelerate your impact. We look for low-ego individuals who thrive in dynamic and fast-moving environments and move with an experimental mindset — who rapidly test emerging capabilities to discover simpler, more powerful ways to deliver results. At Snowflake, your role isn't just to execute a function, but to help redefine the future of how work gets done. ROLE OVERVIEW At Snowflake, we are powering the era of the agentic enterprise. We are looking for AI-native builders and operators who use AI as a core part of how they think, learn, and execute. The Startup Business Development Lead will be a key member of the Snowflake for Startups team, responsible for identifying, engaging, and growing relationships with the most strategic AI-native startups. This person will work across Sales, Product, Marketing, AI Partnerships, Ventures, and Solutions Engineering to help high-potential startups build with Snowflake and accelerate adoption of Snowflake AI. This role requires a rare combination of startup ecosystem credibility, business development judgment, and practical understanding of modern AI application architectures. The ideal candidate can engage founders on both business value and technical direction, and can translate Snowflake’s AI platform into compelling growth opportunities for startup partners. This is an individual contributor role and will be accountable for building a high-quality pipeline of AI-native startup opportunities, increasing activation and adoption of Snowflake AI products, and driving long-term consumption growth from strategic startup partners. KEY RESPONSIBILITIES - Build and grow relationships with high-priority AI-native startups, founders, venture investors, and ecosystem partners . - Develop and execute a startup GTM strategy to accelerate adoption of Snowflake with a heavy emphasis on Snowflakes AI products. - Serve as a trusted voice on AI-native startup trends, including model usage, data infrastructure, agentic workflows, and enterprise adoption patterns. - Help founders understand how to build and scale AI applications with Snowflake, including Cortex AI, Cortex Agents, Cortex Search, Document AI, Snowpark ML, and related platform capabilities. - Partner with Sales, Solutions Engineering, Product, Marketing, AI Partnerships, and Snowflake Ventures to drive coordinated startup acquisition and expansion motions. - Create repeatable programs, founder engagements, and ecosystem initiatives that increase startup pipeline, product adoption, and workload growth. - Prioritize the startup landscape based on strategic fit, technical relevance, market momentum, and potential for long-term Snowflake consumption. - Track business outcomes, surface market insights, and provide regular recommendations to improve strategy, coverage, and execution. BASIC QUALIFICATIONS - 8+ years of experience in business development, partnerships, startup programs, venture, GTM, cloud, AI/ML, or related fields. - Experience working with high-growth startups, including founder engagement and cross-functional partnership execution. - Strong understanding of the modern AI stack, including LLM-powered applications, retrieval-augmented generation, agents, model serving, and data infrastructure. - Ability to translate technical platform capabilities into clear business value for founders, builders, and executive stakeholders. - Demonstrated ability to develop partnership strategies, scale programs, and drive measurable business outcomes. - Strong executive communication, relationship-building, and stakeholder management skills. - High comfort operating in ambiguity, moving between strategy and execution, and prioritizing in a fast-changing market. - Data-driven operating style with experience using metrics to evaluate opportunities, influence decisions, and improve execution. PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS - Experience in the AI-native startup ecosystem as a founder, operator, investor, or partner leader. - Strong familiarity with enterprise AI application patterns such as RAG, agent orchestration, tool use, evaluation, governance, and model optimization. - Working knowledge of the Snowflake AI stack, especially Cortex AI, Cortex Agents, Cortex Search, Document AI, Snowpark ML, and AI Data Cloud adoption patterns. - Experience helping technical startups refine enterprise positioning, GTM motions, and customer adoption strategy. WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE IN 12 MONTHS - Built trusted relationships with a high-priority set of AI-native startups, key VC firms, and ecosystem partners. . - Increased startup adoption of Snowflake AI and expanded the pipeline of AI-native workloads built on Snowflake. - Established repeatable founder engagement and ecosystem programs that generate measurable startup pipeline and consumption growth. - Improved internal alignment across Sales, Product, Marketing, AI Partnerships, Ventures, and Solutions Engineering around the startup strategy. - Brought clear market intelligence and actionable recommendations on where Snowflake should invest to win with AI-native startups. Reports to Head of Snowflake Startups, North America Location: Menlo Park, CA (Hybrid; in office 3 days per week) Every Snowflake employee is expected to follow the company’s confidentiality and security standards for handling sensitive data. Snowflake employees must abide by the company’s data security plan as an essential part of their duties. It is every employee's duty to keep customer information secure and confidential. Snowflake is growing fast, and we’re scaling our team to help enable and accelerate our growth. We are looking for people