Senior Director - EMEA Startup Business Development
On-siteLondon, England, United Kingdom
Job Summary
Define and execute CoreWeave's EMEA startup business development strategy, operating plan, and investment priorities. Build a systematic view of regional startup opportunities, identifying markets, investor portfolios, and companies most likely to become significant consumers of AI infrastructure. Establish clear criteria for prioritizing startups based on technical ambition, compute intensity, funding trajectory, and strategic value. Build senior relationships with venture capital firms, seed and growth investors, accelerators, universities, research laboratories, and founder communities. Develop strategic engagement plans for priority ecosystem organizations and create repeatable mechanisms for portfolio introductions, founder support, and market intelligence. Position CoreWeave as the preferred AI infrastructure and developer platform for companies with meaningful training, fine-tuning, inference, and applied-intelligence requirements. Engage founders, CTOs, researchers, and investors before infrastructure architectures are established. Create qualified opportunities and introductions for country Startup and Digital Native field teams, connecting high-potential companies rapidly to sellers, technical resources, and executive sponsors. Partner with country sales leaders to define target companies and engagement strategies while maintaining clear account ownership. Coordinate strategically important opportunities across Sales, Field Engineering, Product, Engineering, Capacity, Finance, Legal, Marketing, and Customer Success. Establish clear programme eligibility, investment, and graduation criteria. Act as the regional voice of the startup ecosystem inside CoreWeave, translating market insight into recommendations for Product, Engineering, Capacity, Marketing, and commercial leadership. Build, lead, and develop a high-performing EMEA Startup Business Development team with complementary programme and geographic coverage. Establish a rigorous operating cadence and scorecard covering ecosystem coverage, target-company engagement, field acceptance, sourced and influenced pipeline, technical activation, consumption, and downstream commercial impact.
Required Qualifications
- 15+ years of experience in business development, sales, partnerships, startup go-to-market or venture ecosystem leadership within cloud infrastructure, enterprise technology, AI or another complex technology environment
- Significant leadership experience building and operating startup, venture capital or ecosystem programmes across multiple EMEA markets
- A proven record of converting ecosystem relationships into qualified opportunities, technical adoption, pipeline, consumption and commercial growth
- Demonstrated experience developing senior relationships with venture capital firms, accelerators, universities, research organisations, founders, CTOs and technology executives
- Experience working with country sales organisations to create demand and accelerate customer acquisition without displacing account ownership
- Strong understanding of the startup lifecycle, from formation and seed funding through venture growth and scaled commercial operation
- Experience identifying promising companies early and assessing their technical ambition, infrastructure needs, funding trajectory and long-term potential
- Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure, AI platforms, developer tooling and the requirements of AI-native companies
- Demonstrated ability to build structured programmes, operating mechanisms and performance measures that scale beyond personal relationships
- Experience aligning Sales, Field Engineering, Product, Marketing, Finance, Legal and executive stakeholders around shared opportunities
- Strong analytical and operational capability, including market segmentation, portfolio analysis, opportunity attribution and executive business reviews
- Experience building, hiring, coaching and developing high-performing business development or ecosystem teams
- A record of operating successfully across EMEA markets and cultures
- The ability to travel regularly
- A bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience
Desired Qualifications
- Leadership experience within the startup organisation of a major hyperscale cloud provider, AI platform company or global infrastructure technology business
- Direct experience building or scaling a regional startup business measured through customer acquisition, workload adoption, consumption and revenue
- Experience designing the operating model between a regional startup business development organisation and country-based sales teams
- Established senior relationships across the EMEA venture capital and AI startup ecosystem
- Experience working with compute-intensive AI companies across training, fine-tuning, inference, applied AI or AI platform development
- Experience creating startup programmes or technical adoption mechanisms that helped companies progress from experimentation to scaled production workloads
- Experience influencing product, capacity and go-to-market decisions using insight from founders, investors and startups
- Experience focused primarily on events, sponsorships, brand awareness or community activity
Hiring someone like this?
Get your role in front of qualified candidates on Sorce.