Strategic Business Development, Life Sciences

Department: GTM & Partnerships

Location: Boston

Location Type: Hybrid

Employment Type: Full-time

About Liquid AI

Liquid AI’s mission is to build efficient, general-purpose intelligence at every scale. Founded out of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT in 2023, we build small, efficient, and incredibly fast foundation models that can run directly on the devices all around us—phones, cars, and laptops—with no internet needed. We are scaling and need exceptional people to drive our growth.

About the role

We are seeking a strategic business development lead to build our life sciences business. You will turn our early work in drug discovery and biology into long-term partnerships and revenue with pharmaceutical, biotech, and research organizations. Our partnership with Insilico Medicine has already produced LFM2-2.6B-MMAI for drug discovery and LFM2 Longevity models for aging research. You will drive adoption of Liquid Foundation Models across life sciences, help shape how our scientific and bio models are built and taken to market, and run deals from the first conversation to close.

Technical fluency and life sciences expertise is central to this role. Our counterparts are heads of AI, computational chemistry and biology leaders, and R&D executives at pharma and biotech companies. They want to know how a model performs on their data and tasks, where it falls short, and what it takes to deploy on their private infrastructure. You need to be able to drive these conversations credibly, work alongside our research team and engineers on evaluations and deployments, and bring what you learn back into our model and product roadmap.

You will be our first business development hire in life sciences and will work directly with the founders and business leadership. This role suits someone who wants to build the playbook while closing first-of-a-kind deals.

Responsibilities

• Own deals end to end, from identifying and prioritizing pharma, biotech, and research partners through negotiation, close, and delivery. You are accountable for the revenue.

• Source opportunities across drug discovery and life sciences R&D through your network and outreach.

• Manage and expand our existing life sciences partnerships, including our work with Insilico Medicine.

• Negotiate first-of-a-kind agreements that combine licensing, revenue sharing, co-development, and roadmap commitments.

• Lead technical and scientific conversations with heads of AI, computational scientists, and R&D leaders, and work with our scientists and engineers on technical deep-dives, proofs of concept, benchmarks, and deployment planning.

• Be the voice of the market internally. Bring back objections, competitive intelligence, pricing feedback, and emerging use cases that should influence our product, model roadmap, and positioning.

• Build our life sciences GTM engine. Define how we evaluate and qualify partners, shape our external messaging, and develop the infrastructure and operating cadences that will let our team and business scale.

Desired experience

• 10+ years in business development, partnerships, or corporate development in pharma, biotech, or life sciences technology, with a record of deals that moved revenue.

• Recent deal experience bringing AI/ML, computational platforms, or data products into pharma and biotech R&D.

• Deep knowledge of drug discovery and development, and of how pharma and biotech companies evaluate, buy, and partner on R&D technology.

• High technical and scientific fluency. You understand what foundation models can do and how that translates into R&D workflows, and you can work credibly with scientists and engineers on both sides of the table.

• Demonstrated success structuring and personally negotiating complex agreements with senior executives, such as R&D collaborations or platform licensing deals, including multi-year deals with interlocking terms, often several at once.

• Experience leading cross-functional teams across Product, Engineering, Legal, and Finance to bring an agreement from structuring through signature and delivery.

• Relationships with R&D, computational, and data science leaders at pharma and biotech companies, and a record of sourcing your own opportunities.

• Experience at an early-stage or growth-stage company where you helped build the motion rather than run an established one.

What we offer

• Compensation: Competitive base salary + variable compensation with equity in a unicorn-stage company

• Health: We pay 100% of medical, dental, and vision premiums for employees and dependents

• Financial: 401(k) matching up to 4% of base pay

• Time Off: Unlimited PTO plus company-wide Refill Days throughout the year