What if your business development experience could help advance cancer research, model climate impacts, or combat human trafficking, instead of chasing incremental deals or selling pre-packaged solutions?
At Kitware, you won't be selling a fixed product or following someone else's roadmap. You'll work directly with engineers and researchers to identify opportunities, shape what gets built, and turn real-world problems into funded, high-impact technical work. That might mean shaping an AI-driven medical imaging platform, a large-scale scientific data system, or a geospatial analytics capability that doesn't exist yet.
What You'll Do
- Build a strong pipeline of government and commercial opportunities aligned with the Software & Data Solutions strategy.
- Develop trusted relationships with government agencies, commercial organizations, research institutions, and strategic partners that lead to new and repeat business.
- Identify and shape opportunities by connecting customer needs with Kitware's technical capabilities and collaborating with engineers and researchers to turn promising ideas into fundable projects.
- Lead proposal efforts from early customer engagement through proposal development, submission, and award.
- Craft compelling proposals by collaborating with Kitware's technical experts to translate customer needs and technical approaches into persuasive, well-written proposals.
- Sustain strategic customer relationships beyond the initial award, partnering with project and technical leads to ensure customer success, identify follow-on opportunities, and grow key accounts.
- Shape and execute team growth strategy by identifying emerging markets, partnership opportunities, and technology areas where Kitware can build impactful and transformative capabilities.
- Represent Kitware at customer meetings, conferences, industry events, and technical workshops.
Who You AreYou bridge technical innovation and customer needs. You know how to build trust, originate and shape opportunities, and collaborate with technical teams to turn ideas into funded programs and lasting partnerships.
You bring (required):- 10+ years of relevant experience, with demonstrated success originating, shaping, and winning complex technical work in both government R&D and commercial markets.
- Experience leading capture from early customer engagement through proposal development and award.
- A record of building and growing strategic customer relationships that generate new and repeat business.
- An established professional network that has created business opportunities or strategic partnerships.
- Ability to understand complex technical concepts, contribute substantive proposal writing, and communicate effectively with engineers, researchers, executives, and customers.
- Bachelor's degree in business, a STEM field, or a related area, or equivalent professional experience.
- Willingness to work in a Kitware office at least three days per week.
- Due to contractual restrictions, only candidates who are U.S. persons (citizens, permanent residents, asylees, or refugees) will be considered for this position.
You've likely also done some of these (preferred):- Led business development or capture at a research organization, technology company, or scientific software firm.
- Held a technical leadership, solution-development, or customer-facing engineering role.
- Developed opportunities involving AI/ML, scientific software, data platforms, visualization, medical imaging, geospatial analytics, or high-performance computing.
- Built partnerships with federal R&D agencies, research universities, national laboratories, or commercial technology companies.
- Worked in open-source software or collaborative R&D environments.
You'll thrive here if you:- Prefer shaping new solutions over selling predefined products.
- Are curious about new technologies, markets, and customer problems-and recognize where Kitware can add value.
- Build lasting relationships and exercise sound judgment about which opportunities to pursue.
- Thrive with autonomy, proactively creating opportunities while collaborating closely with technical teams.
Our Interview Process- Initial conversation. Talk with HR about your background, interests, and the role.
- Business and solution-shaping discussion. Meet engineering and business leaders to discuss relationship development, opportunity identification, capture, and collaboration with technical teams.
- Full-day interview. Meet team members and leadership, present an opportunity you helped develop and win, and discuss customer relationships, capture strategy, and ways of working.
$130,000 - $175,000 a year
Benefits Include:- Six weeks of paid time off
- Flexible working hours
- Competitive compensation
- Employee bonus plan
- 401(k)
- Health and life insurance
- Short- and long-term disability insurance
- Tuition reimbursement
- Relocation assistance when applicable
- Free coffee, drinks, and snacks
For more information on our benefit offerings, please visit: https://www.kitware.com/careers/.
