DescriptionThe Role:
AI inferencing is rapidly becoming one of the most dynamic areas of the AI infrastructure market, creating a broad ecosystem of processors, accelerators, architectures, and emerging technology companies competing to power AI at massive scale.
VAST Data is looking for a Director of Business Development - AI Partnerships to build our strategy and partnerships across this emerging ecosystem.
In this role, you'll help map an ecosystem that is still taking shape, prioritize the partnerships with the greatest potential, and build the technical and commercial alignment required to turn them into meaningful enterprise GTM motions.
What You'll Do:
- Own VAST's business development strategy across the emerging AI inference and accelerator ecosystem.
- 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.
- Understand each partner's technology deeply enough to determine where it fits within the broader AI infrastructure stack and how VAST complements.
- 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.
- Build joint account strategies and co-selling motions that enable VAST and our partners to win together.
- Connect VAST's sales, solutions, product, and engineering organizations with their counterparts across the partner ecosystem.
- Take partnerships from early conversations and technical exploration through joint solution development and field execution.
- Continuously evaluate a rapidly changing market and help VAST decide where to place its next strategic bets.
RequirementsWe aren't looking for someone who simply knows the right people. We're looking for someone who understands how technology ecosystems get built.
You should bring:
- Significant experience across business development, strategic partnerships, product management, solutions, or ecosystem development within AI infrastructure, semiconductors, cloud, or enterprise infrastructure.
- Strong understanding of the roles that CPUs, GPUs, AI accelerators, storage, networking, and cloud infrastructure play within modern AI architectures.
- Enough technical depth to engage credibly with engineers, architects, product executives, and technical founders.
- 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?
- Demonstrated ability to develop joint solutions and GTM strategies across multiple organizations.
- Strong commercial instincts and the ability to connect technical capabilities to enterprise use cases and revenue opportunities.
- Experience working across Product, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, and partner organizations.
- Comfort working with both large technology companies and highly technical, fast-moving startups.
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.
