Director of Business Development (AI Partnerships)

Join VAST Data as the Director of Business Development – AI Partnerships. In this role, you will be responsible for building the company's strategy and partnerships across the emerging AI inference and accelerator ecosystem. You will develop joint strategies with various companies, understand their technology, and define the technical and business value proposition for each partnership. You will also connect VAST's sales, solutions, product, and engineering organizations with their counterparts across the partner ecosystem. This position requires significant experience in business development, strategic partnerships, product management, solutions, or ecosystem development within AI infrastructure, semiconductors, cloud, or enterprise infrastructure.

• Own VAST's business development strategy across the emerging AI inference and accelerator ecosystem, and build strategic relationships with emerging AI compute, semiconductor, and accelerator companies.
• Develop joint strategies with companies across the broader inference ecosystem, including alternative accelerators, CPUs, GPUs, and purpose-built AI architectures, and define the "better together" technical and business value proposition for each strategic partnership.
• Translate technical alignment into joint solutions, reference architectures, enterprise use cases, and repeatable GTM motions, and build joint account strategies and co-selling motions that enable VAST and our partners to win together.
• Experience working across Product, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, and partner organizations
• Strong understanding of the roles that CPUs, GPUs, AI accelerators, storage, networking, and cloud infrastructure play within modern AI architectures
• The ability to look at an emerging technology and answer: Where does this fit? What problem does it solve? Where does VAST fit alongside it? And how do we take the combination to market?
• Significant experience across business development, strategic partnerships, product management, solutions, or ecosystem development within AI infrastructure, semiconductors, cloud, or enterprise infrastructure
• Demonstrated ability to develop joint solutions and GTM strategies across multiple organizations
• Comfort working with both large technology companies and highly technical, fast-moving startups
• Enough technical depth to engage credibly with engineers, architects, product executives, and technical founders
• Strong commercial instincts and the ability to connect technical capabilities to enterprise use cases and revenue opportunities
• Most importantly, you need to be comfortable operating without a playbook. Many of these markets, companies, and partnerships are still being defined. You'll be expected to create structure where little exists today