Business Development Lead, AI Commercialization

About the Role

<p>Block is building a new generation of AI-powered products with the potential to create entirely new ways for businesses to operate, engage with customers, and grow. We are looking for a self-starting, experienced business development lead to turn these emerging products into meaningful business.</p> <p>This is a highly entrepreneurial role, and requires someone who has done this before: taken technically complex, early-stage products into the market, secured sophisticated enterprise customers and partners, built and converted pilots, and informed pricing and commercial models for scale.</p> <p>This role requires an incredibly driven business development motion – developing our most important enterprise customers and partners, structuring our earliest commercial engagements, and working closely with Product and Engineering to shape what we build.&nbsp;</p> <h4><strong>What You’ll Do</strong></h4> <h4>Win lighthouse enterprise customers and strategic partners</h4> <ul> <li>Source, develop, and close relationships with sophisticated enterprise customers and strategic partners.</li> <li>Engage with senior executives across technology, product, operations, business development, and commercial organizations</li> <li>Identify where strategic partnerships can accelerate distribution, unlock new use cases, or create differentiated product capabilities.</li> <li>Sell products that may still be evolving, creating conviction around the vision while setting appropriate expectations about what exists today.</li> <li>Build a portfolio of lighthouse customers and partners that provides product validation, commercial proof points, references, distribution, and a foundation for broader adoption.</li> </ul> <h4><strong>Build pilots that become scaled commercial relationships</strong></h4> <ul> <li>Drive commercial pilots with enterprise customers and partners with clear objectives, success metrics, economics, timelines, and paths to production and expansion.</li> <li>Own the progression from initial conversation → pilot → production deployment or partnership launch → scaled commercial relationship.</li> <li>Work directly with customers, partners, Product, and Engineering throughout early implementations.</li> <li>Distinguish between strategically important market feedback and bespoke requests that should not drive the roadmap.</li> <li>Use early engagements to rapidly test product-market fit, willingness to pay, partnership models, implementation requirements, and the durability of demand.</li> </ul> <h4><strong>Drive partner GTM and own the relationship end to end</strong></h4> <ul> <li>Sign and launch partners, and own their success end to end: From pitch, negotiations, deal signature, through launch and optimization.</li> <li>Partner with the cross-functional team to refine pitch materials, partner marketing motions and operations.</li> <li>Actively share learnings back with internal stakeholders to refine and optimize the product strategy, while optimizing the partnership for success.</li> <li>Exercise sound judgment and discretion around executive and cross-functional relationship mapping.</li> </ul> <h4><strong>What We’re Looking For</strong></h4> <ul> <li>10+ years of relevant commercial enterprise experience.</li> <li>Direct, demonstrated experience taking new or emerging technology products from early market entry through commercial scale.</li> <li>A track record of personally securing lighthouse enterprise customers and strategic partners, structuring pilots and partnerships, and converting them into scaled commercial relationships.</li> <li>Deep experience selling complex technology to large enterprises and working with sophisticated strategic partners.</li> <li>Established credibility engaging senior technical, product, business development, and commercial executives.</li> <li>Experience commercializing AI, data infrastructure, developer platforms, cloud infrastructure, or similarly complex and rapidly evolving technology.</li> <l