Startup Business Development Lead - Snowflake for Startups

About this role

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

The Startup Business Development Lead will be a pivotal member of a small, agile, and global team. This role acts as a coordination overlay across Sales, Marketing, Product, AI Partnerships, Ventures, and Solutions Engineering teams, with the primary goal of targeting and winning workloads from top AI-native startups.

The successful candidate will be a strategic thinker with a passion for the AI/ML ecosystem, dedicated to identifying and nurturing high-potential startups and ensuring their growth with Snowflake. This is a business role that requires intimate understanding of evolving AI technologies. Keys to success include proactive founder engagement, disciplined prioritization, cross-functional execution, and a commitment to measurable business outcomes.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

1. Build relationships with high-priority AI-native startups

- Leverage existing networks and cultivate new relationships to secure introductions to founders of high-potential AI-native startups.

- Engage founders through direct outreach, partner referrals, industry events, conferences, and targeted networking opportunities.

- Create meaningful founder engagement by connecting startup needs with relevant Snowflake product, go-to-market, and customer opportunities.

- Leverage technical knowledge of AI to win trust and build collaboration hypotheses.

2. Prioritize the startup landscape and maintain market intelligence

- Develop and maintain a categorized list of high-priority startups, including Tier 1 and Tier 2 companies, based on strategic importance, growth potential, funding, technology trends and alignment with Snowflake.

- Continuously monitor venture funding activity, startup formation, product trends, and AI/ML ecosystem shifts to refine prioritization.

- Partner with Sales, Marketing, Product, AI Partnerships, Venture, and Solutions Engineering to maintain a unified approach to startup outreach and engagement.

3. Drive growth, adoption, and partnerships on Snowflake

- Allocate time strategically, with approximately 80% of efforts focused on Tier 1 startups and 20% focused on other high-potential opportunities.

- Facilitate introductions between Tier 1 startup founders and Snowflake Executive Leadership Team members, meaning senior Snowflake leaders who can help deepen strategic relationships.

- Provide go-to-market support by helping startups understand how Snowflake enterprise customers may evaluate, adopt, and expand startup solutions.

- Support Product-Led Growth, meaning self-serve product adoption and expansion, by promoting Cortex AI products to startups not currently built on Snowflake and creating a path for them to move additional data and workloads onto Snowflake.

- Collaborate with Sales and Solutions Engineering teams to help them sell Cortex AI products effectively and understand the consumption patterns, buying motions, and adoption needs of startups.

4. Build demand generation and ecosystem visibility

- Identify and recommend high-leverage events, sponsorships, and ecosystem programs that enhance Snowflake visibility and generate quality startup leads.

- Contribute to workshops, founder programming, PR initiatives, and other content that helps AI startups understand Snowflake offerings and adoption paths.

- Design or support scaled events that create meaningful engagement among startups, venture firms, Snowflake customers, and internal Snowflake stakeholders.

5. Measure outcomes and report progress

- Use measurement insights to refine startup prioritization, engagement strategy, and cross-functional operating cadence.

- Track, and report progress against objectives including priority startup acquisitions, Snowflake commitment contracts, startup influenced consumption via connected apps on Snowflake etc.

- Provide regular reports to management on startup engagement progress, outcomes, successes, challenges, and areas for improvement.

- Work with Finance and Sales Operations to ensure accurate tracking of startup adoption, usage, commitments, and engagement metrics.

QUALIFICATIONS

- 8+ years of experience in business development, partnerships, startup ecosystem development, venture capital, corporate venture, GTM, cloud technology, AI/ML, or a related field.

- Proven experience supporting high-growth startups at different stages of growth, with preference for candidates who have startup operating experience or have worked closely with founders.

- Strong understanding of the AI technology stack, AI startup ecosystem, venture funding trends, cloud and data platform adoption patterns, and key product trends shaping AI-native companies.

- Established network across startup founders, venture capital firms, accelerator ecosystems, enterprise technology leaders, and partner organizations.

- Ability to translate Snowflake capabilities into startup-relevant value propositions, including product adoption, customer access, GTM support, and workload growth.

- Strong executive presence, communication, presentation, and interpersonal skills, with the ability to engage founders, venture partners, senior executives, sales teams, and technical stakeholders.

- Founder empathy and strong judgment in balancing startup needs with Snowflake bu

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