Commercial Operations & Strategy Lead

Persona AI Inc•Houston, TX

2d•Onsite

About The Position

Persona AI is seeking a Commercial Operations & Strategy Lead to support the Head of Commercial Strategy and enhance the company's go-to-market efforts. This role requires an operator adept at managing ambiguity, establishing structure, and advancing complex commercial relationships towards successful contract closures. Initially focused on execution and operations, the role will evolve to support broader commercial team coordination as Persona scales. The immediate priority involves converting anchor Korean relationships, such as HD Hyundai and POSCO, into binding commercial contracts, while simultaneously building the necessary pipeline, processes, and partner management infrastructure for future engagements. Native Korean fluency and cultural understanding of Korean industrial organizations are essential for this mission.

Requirements

Native or fully fluent Korean and English, with demonstrated experience conducting substantive business and deal dialogue in Korean.
Deep familiarity with the norms of trust, hierarchy, and decision-making inside Korean corporate and industrial organizations.
10+ years in roles demanding end-to-end ownership of complex, high-stakes processes (e.g., sales, transactions, corporate development, or operating roles in fast-moving companies).
A track record of bringing structure to ambiguity: building infrastructure, processes, or organizations from scratch rather than inheriting them.
Comfort with a surge-and-maintenance travel rhythm across time zones, and the operating discipline to stay current and unblock work remotely.
Strong commercial and analytical instincts — fluency with contracts, negotiation dynamics, and the numbers behind a deal.

Nice To Haves

Genuine technical fluency or a technical background sufficient to engage credibly on a physical-AI/robotics roadmap.
Exposure to industrial, manufacturing, robotics, or deep-tech environments, or demonstrated initiative to build expertise in them.
Experience managing outside advisors, integrators.

Responsibilities

Drive contracts to close by owning the execution layer beneath active commercial negotiations, including tracking open items, coordinating legal review, managing document flow, and ensuring timely signatures.
Build a source of truth by establishing clear account maps for key relationships, identifying decision-makers, understanding timelines and budget authority, and clarifying opportunity status.
Anchor Korea engagements, serving as a trusted operator across HD Hyundai, POSCO, and other Korean relationships by managing cadence, preparation, follow-through, and conducting business dialogue in Korean.
Manage intermediaries and integrators by coordinating third parties such as integration partners, vendors of record, translators, and advisors to ensure their work aligns with commercial objectives and timelines.
Navigate the systems problem by helping to position Persona and its partners around the integration and systems work surrounding the robot.
Own pipeline operations: Build and maintain pipeline hygiene, qualification discipline, and the operational cadence behind the go-to-market motion.
Operationalize the engagement model: Turn the structured commercial engagement approach into a running, repeatable machine with scalable templates, tracking, and reporting.
Build internal infrastructure: Create dashboards, baseline metrics, and lightweight systems for leadership visibility into commercial health.
Amplify the Head of Commercial Strategy by preparing meetings, capturing and driving decisions, and owning cross-functional follow-through.
Grow into a broader scope by taking ownership of workstreams end to end as the team builds, and help shape the commercial organization as it scales.