Head of Corporate & Business Development, Office of the CSO
$195,750–$261,000 year
On-siteSan Francisco, California, United States
Job Summary
Source and evaluate partnerships, strategic investments, and inorganic opportunities to drive commercial growth end-to-end. Generate, qualify, and close net-new pipeline opportunities while opening new markets and channels. Run the CSO Office operating cadence, including sprint reviews and OKR alignment, to ensure strategic workstreams execute from intent to delivery. Build and lead a focused GTM team of Account Managers amplified by custom-built AI agents for top-of-funnel generation. Synthesize multi-voice communications into clear board updates, investor materials, and partner narratives. Apply structured quantitative rigor to competitive intelligence and market models to turn open questions into ranked options. Operate with founders in high-stakes rooms across US and Asia commercial cultures, using AI tooling to absorb low-level coordination and focus on judgment and human touch.
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.
Desired 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.
Hiring someone like this?
Get your role in front of qualified candidates on Sorce.