Business Development Lead, AI

Monad Foundation • San Francisco, CA

2d • Onsite

About The Position

The Monad Foundation is seeking a Business Development Lead focused on AI and compute to build its ecosystem at the intersection of AI infrastructure, agentic applications, and onchain markets. The role aims to bring early-stage teams to build and launch on Monad, develop relationships with AI founders, venture firms, and compute providers, and help make Monad a preferred settlement layer for live AI and compute products.

The role focuses on tradable compute, agentic payments, and emerging capital markets. The successful candidate will identify where Monad can add value, close commercial deals, and coordinate the Foundation’s resources and network to turn partnerships into deployed products and measurable activity. The position is based in San Francisco and involves building relationships in person across the Bay Area’s AI, compute, and crypto communities.

The Foundation describes its work environment as a lean, collaborative team pursuing ambitious goals, with autonomy, impact, and a focus on high-quality output. The role will work across technical, ecosystem, DeFi, communications, and legal teams.

Requirements

• A record of closing and launching BD or strategic partnerships from an initial conversation to a working product, including partnerships with growth or late-stage businesses.
• Understanding of AI business models and the ability to bring together founders, venture investors, GPU providers, neoclouds, trading firms, and market makers.
• Founder empathy and follow-through: ability to explain Monad’s value, earn partner trust, bring in technical expertise, and sustain momentum through complex integrations.
• Autonomy and sound judgment, including building a pipeline, prioritizing real use cases, setting success and failure criteria, and discontinuing weak opportunities.
• Ability to collaborate with low ego and remain effective without a playbook.
• Based in San Francisco and willing to build relationships in person across the Bay Area’s AI, compute, and crypto communities.

Responsibilities

• Build Monad’s presence in San Francisco and the wider AI community; develop the existing pipeline and source, qualify, follow up with, deploy, and launch new teams.
• Develop relationships with venture firms and crypto-native capital, converting introductions into qualified opportunities and teams building on Monad.
• Recruit protocols, index providers, curators, liquidity providers, compute operators, and trading partners for the compute-markets strategy.
• Develop collaborations around compute index vaults, lending against tokenized compute, and hedging products that bring liquidity and volume to Monad.
• Identify and activate teams building agent-driven and stablecoin payments, including x402 and emerging payment models, and convert integrations into transaction activity.
• Understand partner businesses, communicate Monad’s value, and negotiate commercial arrangements across company stages, connecting traditional financial structuring with onchain execution and settlement.
• Coordinate technical, ecosystem, DeFi, communications, and legal support; set priorities and milestones, remove launch blockers, and track live products, users, payments, liquidity, and sustained volume.

Benefits

• Autonomy and impact while tackling complex, technically demanding problems.
• Opportunity to contribute to Monad’s ecosystem and its onchain finance ambitions.
• Work with a world-class, highly motivated team.
• Collaborative, low-ego culture focused on high-quality output.
• Access to a broader ecosystem supported by leading investors, builders, and long-term contributors.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed