Position Summary:Walden's Chief Strategy Officer is responsible for the company's "why": corporate and competitive strategy, go-to-market, partnerships, marketing, fundraising support, and the executive and investor narrative. We're hiring a Head of Corporate & Business Development to be the CSO's right hand and own commercial growth end-to-end. You lead both corporate development (partnerships, strategic investments, and inorganic growth) and go-to-market (the net-new pipeline, from first touch to close and expansion), supplying the rigor, deal execution, and follow-through to scale a vision-led, relationship-led founder's reach to the company's ambition. It is a senior role with the latitude to build a focused team as the company grows.
Core Responsibilities:- Corporate development: Source, evaluate, structure, and drive partnerships, strategic investments, and inorganic opportunities to a result, running the diligence, modeling, and analysis with the CSO, Finance, and custom-built AI agents. Turn rapidly growing inbound interest into a prioritized, defensible plan.
- Go-to-market: Generate, qualify, develop, and close commercial and partnership opportunities. Open new markets and channels. Run the engine to help nurture and grow our pipeline. Grow to build and lead a focused GTM team of per-segment Account Managers amplified by custom-built AI agents that run top-of-funnel generation and qualification. Carry the most strategic deals with the founders.
- Analytical engine: Bring structured, quantitative rigor to the questions that move the company, including competitive and market intelligence, strategic and business models, and decision memos that turn open questions into ranked options and a clear recommendation.
- Right hand across the CSO's mandate: Run the CSO Office operating cadence (sprint reviews, OKR and KPI alignment, legible view of every strategic and commercial workstream) and support priority initiatives from intent to delivery, so nothing important falls through.
- Executive communications: Support the CSO's highest-stakes communications, board updates, investor materials, all-hands content, and partner narratives, synthesizing many voices into one clear position. Present strategic initiatives faithfully when needed.
- Agents as force-multiplier: Just as the physical agents we build amplify our customers, Walden builds internal software agents to amplify us. Use them to absorb low-level coordination and synthesis so your attention goes to judgment, your craft, and the human touch, not busywork.
Required Qualifications:- 10+ years across some mix of corporate development, business development, partnerships, investment banking, private equity or venture, management consulting, and startup operating or leadership roles, including real operating time inside a high-growth company.
- A track record of sourcing, structuring, and closing partnerships, strategic investments, or complex commercial deals with sophisticated counterparties, and of owning ambiguous cross-functional work to a decision and a result.
- Exceptional structured thinking and written communication: you build the model, write the memo, and compress a multi-voice debate into clear, concise, and actionable documents, not AI slop.
- High judgment on prioritization and escalation, and the maturity to operate with founders in high-stakes rooms.
- Comfort with the empirical, iterative nature of an early-stage company: a strong bias to action over analysis-paralysis, and the ability to be decisive under uncertainty.
- Comfort using AI tooling as a force multiplier: you are an active, curious user of AI agents; you do not need to write code but you need to be great at running experiments, thinking in systems, partnering with AI Engineers, and wrangling AI slop.
Preferred Qualifications:- Deep-tech, robotics, AI, hardware, or frontier-tech exposure, with enough fluency to hold a credible technical conversation. You do not set the science, but you understand it at a high-level.
- Prior Corporate Development, Business Development, Strategy and Operations, or Chief-of-Staff leadership at a high-growth startup or scaleup.
- Fundraising, board, or investor-relations exposure: you've helped prepare the materials and sat close to the process.
- Direct experience in one or more of the CSO's surface areas: go-to-market, partnerships, or marketing strategy.
- Comfortable operating across US and Asia commercial cultures (automotive, semiconductors, aerospace) and across time zones.
- Familiarity with systems-integrator relationships and multi-stakeholder enterprise accounts.
Walden Robotics offers a competitive total compensation program, including salary, annual cash bonus, company equity, company-subsidized insurance programs, 401(k) with company match, flexible PTO, daily lunch, and other benefits. The pay ranges noted on our posts is for salary only.
The pay range for this role is:
195,750 - 261,000 USD per year (SF)
