Head of Startups and Venture Capital, Sales

Fireworks • San Francisco, CA

1d

About The Position

Fireworks is hiring a Head of Startups & Venture Capital to build and lead its startup ecosystem programs, partnerships, and relationships, helping make Fireworks the default AI platform for emerging AI-native companies. The role owns relationships with venture firms and accelerators, designs the startup program, and helps early-stage builders become production-scale customers. It combines ecosystem relationship building with measurable pipeline, adoption, and revenue outcomes.

The position is based in San Mateo, California, or San Francisco, California. The successful candidate will work across Sales, Marketing, Product, Developer Relations, and Finance, and will bring founder and investor feedback to product and leadership. Fireworks describes the role as a builder position in a high-growth environment where the playbook is still being developed.

Requirements

• At least 5 years of experience in startup partnerships, venture capital, business development, or go-to-market roles at a cloud, developer, or AI infrastructure company.
• An established network across top-tier venture firms, accelerators, and founders.
• A proven track record of turning ecosystem relationships into measurable pipeline, product adoption, and revenue.
• Experience designing and operating startup programs involving credits, perks, and technical enablement, with clear economics and accountability.
• Technical fluency sufficient to discuss open-source models, inference performance, fine-tuning, and cost trade-offs credibly with founders and CTOs.
• Comfort working in a high-growth environment, developing the plan and executing it.
• Strong cross-functional partnership skills across Sales, Marketing, Product, Developer Relations, and Finance.
• Genuine enthusiasm for founders and early-stage builders.

Nice To Haves

• Experience running a startup or VC program at a hyperscaler, AI lab, or developer platform.
• Prior experience as a VC investor, a platform lead at a venture firm, or a founder or early employee at a venture-backed startup.
• Existing relationships with AI-focused funds, accelerators, and founder communities.
• Background in a technical, product, or developer relations role.

Responsibilities

• Define and own Fireworks' startup and venture strategy, including target segments, programs, partner tiers, and goals for pipeline, activation, and revenue.
• Build and scale the Fireworks Startup Program, including technical programming, go-to-market benefits, and paths from self-serve usage to committed contracts.
• Build relationships with partners and platform teams at venture firms, accelerators, and incubators, establishing Fireworks as a recommended platform for portfolio companies building with AI.
• Run portfolio-wide partnerships, including perks and credits agreements, office hours, technical workshops, founder dinners, and AI infrastructure briefings.
• Represent Fireworks at demo days, accelerator cohorts, hackathons, panels, and founder communities.
• Track program economics and impact, including credit spend, activation, conversion to paid usage, and influenced revenue, and report results to GTM leadership.
• Bring feedback from founders and investors to product and leadership, including insights about models, workloads, and features needed by emerging companies.
• Build and scale a high-performing startup and VC team.

Benefits

• Work on challenging AI infrastructure problems, including low-latency inference and scalable model serving.
• Work with emerging technology that affects how businesses and developers use AI globally.
• Ownership and the opportunity to shape the future of AI in a fast-growing team.
• Collaborate with engineers and AI researchers.

What This Job Offers

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