Technical Business Development Manager - Startup & VC Ecosystem

RDQ427R630

This role is in-person and Bay-Area-based by design, so you can be in the room with founders and investors.

At Databricks, we are obsessed with enabling data teams to solve the world's toughest problems, from security threat detection to cancer drug development. We do this by building and running the world's best data and AI infrastructure platform, so our customers can focus on the high-value challenges central to their missions. Founded in 2013 by the original creators of Apache Spark™, Databricks has grown from a tiny corner office in Berkeley, CA, to a global organization with over 11,000 employees. Thousands of organizations, from small startups to Fortune 100, trust Databricks with their mission-critical workloads, making us one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in the world and one of the top 5 most valuable private companies.

About the Role:

Databricks works with founders from the earliest days of their companies, when it is still just a team, an idea, and a lot of unproven AI. The Technical Business Development Manager for the Startup and VC Ecosystem owns the operational engine and the relationships behind that work, and the role is technical. You will run our startup program day to day, sit across from early-stage founders and talk seriously about their AI systems, produce a steady cadence of founder and investor events in San Francisco, and work hand in hand with the events teams at the venture firms whose founders we most want to reach. You will work closely with Databricks Ventures. This role is built to grow: you will start close to the program, the founders, and the events, and over time, take on more of the relationships and the strategy for how Databricks engages the startup ecosystem end-to-end.

This role asks for four things that rarely sit in one person: the discipline of an operator who tracks every applicant and commitment without dropping one, the hands of a builder who is genuinely fluent in AI and can talk to a founder as a peer, the ease of someone who earns the trust of founders and the partners at the best venture firms in the country, and the judgment to turn all of that into strategy for how Databricks wins the next generation of companies. Most strong candidates have two of these, and some have three. We are hiring for trajectory: you should already be strong in the operating and the building, and hungry to grow into relationships and strategy. This is one of the rare seats where operating, building, and relationship-building are the same job. 

The impact you will have: 

• Run the startup program: Own the day-to-day operations of the program, including applicant intake, evaluation, scoring, routing, and offer decisions, with precise tracking of every applicant, commitment, and outcome. Run it on AI automation built with Databricks AI tooling such as Omnigent, Unity Gateway, Agent Bricks, etc. Strong, hands-on proficiency with these tools is a requirement, not just knowing your way around them.
• Bring programmatic discipline: Own the trackers, the automation, the quality bar, and the follow-through so that nothing falls through the cracks.
• Be technical with founders: Hold real technical conversations with early-stage founders about their models, agents, data, and automation, and where Databricks and Neon fit. Earn their trust by being credible on the technology, not by pitching.
• Build and prototype: Build the automation and internal tooling that runs the program, and stay hands-on with the same AI tools founders use, so you can assess their technical ideas from a place of experience. This is developer relations at its most technical: close to the code and close to the builders.
• Assess and translate: Assess each founder's technical capability and the strength of their idea, and carry what you learn back to Product and to Databricks Ventures.
• Run founder and investor events: Design and run a regular calendar of founder and investor gatherings in San Francisco, including dinners, workshops, office hours, and demo-day tie-ins. Partner with the events and platform teams at leading venture firms to co-produce these gatherings, and build durable relationships with those teams that deepen over time.
• Represent Databricks in the ecosystem: Show up as a founder-first, technically credible presence at founder and investor events, and grow into being one of the faces of Databricks across the venture community.
• Grow into ownership: Work alongside Databricks Ventures on how we engage founders across the full arc of their journey, from a first look at their technology and ideas to whatever they build next, and grow into broader ownership of the startup function as you build trust and results.

What we look for: 

This is a rare combination, and we know it. We are hiring for trajectory as much as for a finished resume: the strongest candidates are already strong on the first three and eager to grow into the rest.

• Genuinely technical with AI. You build. You can prototype an automation, reason about an agent architecture, and get into the details of a founder's stack without hand-waving.
• A programmatic operator with an obsessive eye for detail. You run complex, multi-track programs without dropping a thread.
• The developer-relations instinct. You earn credibility with builders by being one, and you can explain and teach hard technical ideas clearly.
• Comfortable around early-stage founders and investors, and ready to build relationships with top venture firms, starting with their events teams and growing toward their partners.
• Experience helping design and run events that people actually want to attend.
• Comfort switching between hands-on technical work, operational execution, and strategic thinking in the same day.
• Based in San Francisco. This role requires regular in-person time with founders and investors in the Bay Area.
• Empathy for founders and a long view of their careers. You understand that a founder's first company is rarely their last.
• Nice to have: a background as a founder, an early engineer, or a forward-deployed or solutions engineer; experience in B2B SaaS, AI and data infrastructure, or developer ecosystems.

Zone 1 Pay Range 118900 - 163450 USD