Business Development Strategist (BDS)

Business Development Strategist (BDS) | Edgescale AI Location: Hybrid (Denver, CO) The Opportunity We’re looking for a Business Development Strategist (BDS) to serve as a hybrid "business athlete" focused on Fortune 500 and 1000 organizations. Rather than relying on high-volume cold calling, this role prioritizes deep lead qualification, long-term nurturing, and strategic partner management. You will act as the primary driver of the early-stage sales funnel while maintaining continuous, warm relationships with customers throughout their entire lifecycle. At Edgescale AI, we operate in an AI-native environment. You won't just be selling AI; you will use the latest AI tools to accelerate your own workflow—from synthesizing market insights to generating high-value content—ensuring our go-to-market motion is as advanced as the platform we build. What You’ll Do Business Development (45%): Build and maintain continuous relationships with prospects during long deployment timelines to ensure they are nurtured until ready for technical deep dives. Partner Development (40%): Build and manage co-sell and channel relationships with ISVs, service providers, and industrial automation leaders. Thought Leadership & Social Selling (10%): Produce thought leadership (including newsletters, blogs, and articles) to educate the market and generate inbound demand across target industrial sectors. Product Insights (5%): Relay customer and market insights back to the deployment and product teams to shape future features and roadmaps. AI-Native Execution: Use AI tools to accelerate synthesis, writing, and artifact generation, refining AI-generated outputs with professional judgment and real-world validation. What Success Looks Like In your first 3 months, you will have: Developed relationships with 10 high potential go-to-market partners. Identify 20 new prospects and help advance the opportunity to a formal evaluation (Solution Validation stage). Published your first 3 high-value thought leadership pieces to drive brand authority. In your first year, you will be: Collaborating with Edgescale’s CEO, CMO, and Head of Partnerships to develop go-to-market strategy and tactics. Driving consistent pipeline velocity and materially increasing conversion through clearer value articulation. Operating as a trusted advisor to customers and partners, initiating joint account mapping and co-sell motions that scale our market reach. Establishing durable success KPIs for the early-stage funnel that enable the team to deliver value with lower variance. Who You Are Experience: 7+ years in business development, strategic account management, technical sales strategy focused on large, complex enterprise deployments, or other relevant industry experience. Business Acumen: Strong ability to quantify ROI and business value, prioritize opportunity cost, and guide executive decision-making under constraints. Technical Literacy: Deep comfort learning new and emerging technologies and becoming proficient in discussing them with a variety of technical and non-technical stakeholders at all levels. Communicator: A clear synthesizer who can turn complex industrial requirements into crisp patterns and compelling narratives. Mindset: An ownership mindset that prioritizes measurable outcomes over simple tasks. Benefits We work in a high-ownership, real-world startup environment where you’ll move fast, build new systems, and see your impact immediately—what you ship runs in the field and drives measurable customer outcomes. Our operational foundation is AI-native. We strategically integrate cutting-edge AI tools to optimize every stage of our workflow—from concept to deployment—ensuring maximum speed, efficiency, and the ability to deliver transformative value to our customers at scale. You’ll take on elite technical challenges at the frontier of infrastructure, including next-generation cloud and IoT, hardware/software/networking in real-world edge environments, the foundation for data and AI inference, and industry-leading secure systems in demanding operational (OT) settings. You’ll learn fast by working with exceptional teammates and collaborating directly with industry leaders as partners in software, AI, and infrastructure. Your base salary will be determined based on your location, experience, and the pay of employees in similar positions. This role has a base salary range of $100,000 – $120,000 with a performance-based bonus range of $45,000 – $55,000. Target total cash compensation (OTE): $145,000 – $175,000. Total compensation for this role includes equity in your work. You are eligible for meaningful equity through stock options in an early-stage, high-growth company. You are eligible to participate in company benefit plans, which may include health, dental, and vision coverage, a 401(k) with company match, flexible PTO, paid parental leave, commuter benefits, and relocation and visa support for eligible roles. Edgescale AI At Edgescale AI, we’re deploying AI in the real world—helping customers apply this technology to unlock transformative productivity gains. Our work sits at the intersection of infrastructure, security, networking, and AI, where reliability and performance are non-negotiable and where solutions demand deep, distributed systems thinking. We’re intensely AI-native. We build with AI, we ship AI, and we use it every day to accelerate how we design, test, deploy, and operate complex systems. If you want to help pave the application of AI in the real world, at global scale, we want to hear from you. Edgescale AI is building an inclusive, merit-based organization. We are an equal opportunity employer and do not discriminate on any legally protected status. We value diversity, inclusion, and a shared passion for creating real-world impact.