Business Development Director - AI Natives

About the role

About Nscale Nscale is the GPU cloud engineered for AI. We provide cost-effective, high-performance infrastructure for AI start-ups and large enterprise customers. Nscale enables AI-focused companies to achieve superior results by reducing the complexity of AI development. Our GPU cloud bolsters technical capabilities and directly supports strategic business outcomes, including cost management, rapid innovation, and environmental responsibility. We thrive on a culture of relentless innovation, ownership, and accountability, where every team member takes pride in their work and drives it with excellence and urgency. As an Nscaler, you'll build trust through openness and transparency, where everyone is inspired to do their best work. If you join our team, you'll be contributing to building the technology that powers the future. About the Role As Business Development Director for AI Natives, you will join as the founding member of a new team to build and grow Nscale's most strategic ecosystem of AI-native companies: frontier model labs, fast-scaling AI start-ups, and the founders building the next generation of AI products. You will have the opportunity to work with the most innovative companies and help them build and scale their products and business on a purpose built cloud and compute platform for AI workloads. You will have the opportunity to identify, prioritize and partner with the most consequential companies based on business viability, technical feasibility, deal economics and joint business growth potential. You will own deals end to end, from prospect, fit-gap discovery and commercial structuring to customers building and launching their products on Nscale Cloud. Along the way you will build durable partnerships and executive relationships with founders, CTOs, research leads and the VCs and incubators. You will also bring customer insight back to product and engineering to influence product and platform roadmap, and represent Nscale at AI-native events and in developer communities. This is an early, high-ownership and high-impact role: you will help define how Nscale wins the AI-native market rather than inherit a fixed playbook. What you'll be doing: - Business Development : Build and run a pipeline of AI-native accounts, from seed-stage model builders to frontier labs, using targeted outreach, founder networks, VC relationships and community events. - Revenue Acceleration : Win marquee AI native accounts by leading end to end engagement on complex deals for reserved GPU clusters, dedicated. infrastructure and managed cloud (Kubernetes, Slurm, inference endpoints) - Cross-functional Ownership : Translate customer roadmaps (training runs, inference scale-up, model launches) into capacity plans and joint solution launch plans, orchestrating across solutions engineers, product and regional sales. - Structure commercial terms : pricing, commit length, ramp schedules, SLAs and payment terms, with finance and legal. - Voice of the customer: Partner with product and engineering to prioritize AI Natives capability requirements and gaps, using customer, competitive and industry insight. - Ecosystem activation : Work with ecosystem partners, VC and Startup Incubators to source and co-sell opportunities, driving preference for Nscale platform. - Platform partnerships : Expand existing accounts as customers scale, turning first clusters into long-term platform relationships. - Thought leadership : Represent Nscale at AI-native events, industry forums, case studies and developer communities to grow mind and market share. - Market intelligence: Feed market signals back to product and leadership: competitive pricing, new GPU demand, and what AI natives need next. What you need to bring: - 10+ years in business development, strategic sales or partnerships, including 5+ years selling cloud, AI infrastructure or developer platforms. - Track record of closing complex, multi-million-dollar deals with technical buyers, and exceeding management business objectives or quota. - Working knowledge of the AI compute stack: GPU generations, training vs inference workloads, clusters and networking, storage, Kubernetes and Slurm, and the Nvidia software ecosystem. - Established network across AI-native founders, research labs, VCs or accelerators in Europe or the USA. - Ability to run technical discovery with engineering and research leads, and translate needs into a commercial proposal. - Clear written and verbal communication, from developer to board level. - Comfort in a fast-scaling company, with ambiguity and a high bar for ownership. - Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience. What you'll ideally have: - Prior experience at a GPU cloud or neocloud, hyperscaler startups team (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure), Nvidia, or an AI-native company. - Founder or early-stage startup experience. - Experience with Nvidia Inception, VC platform teams or accelerator programs. - Technical background in computer science, engineering or ML. - MBA or equivalent strategic training. What We Can Offer You At Nscale, you'll find a collaborative, supportive, and innovative environment where your contributions spark real impact. We're building something extraordinary, and we want you at the core. - Highly competitive package including equity. - Join one of the world's fastest-growing tech startups: your chance to push boundaries, collaborate with brilliant minds, and make your mark on cutting-edge AI. - Expect a dynamic progression plan tailored to your ambitions. Grow by trying new things, leading, challenging the status quo, and owning your impact, always with our full support. Equal Opportunities Statement At Nscale, we are committed to fostering an inclusive, diverse, and equitable workplace. We believe that a variety of perspectives enriches our work environment, and we encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds, experiences, and abilities. We strongly encourage applications from people of colour, the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities, neurodivergent people, parents, carers, and people from lower socio-economic backgrounds. If there's anything we can do to accommodate your specific situation, please let us know. For information on how Nscale handles candidate personal data, please see our Employee & Candidate Privacy Notice: Here. Nscale does not accept unsolicited candidate submissions from recruitment agencies.