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Liquid AI, founded in 2023 from MIT's CSAIL, builds efficient foundation models that run on-device across phones, cars, and laptops. The company is seeking a Strategic Business Development lead to build and scale the life sciences business.
You will own end-to-end deal cycles with pharmaceutical, biotech, and research organizations, turning Liquid AI's early work in drug discovery and biology into long-term partnerships and revenue. The company has already partnered with Insilico Medicine to produce 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 scientific and bio models are built and taken to market, and run deals from initial conversation through close.
This is Liquid AI's first business development hire in life sciences, and you will work directly with founders and business leadership. Your counterparts will be heads of AI, computational chemistry and biology leaders, and R&D executives at pharma and biotech companies who need to understand model performance on their data, deployment requirements, and integration with private infrastructure.
Key responsibilities include: owning deals end-to-end from partner identification through negotiation and close; sourcing opportunities across drug discovery and life sciences R&D; managing and expanding existing partnerships; negotiating complex first-of-a-kind agreements combining licensing, revenue sharing, co-development, and roadmap commitments; leading technical and scientific conversations with senior stakeholders; serving as the voice of the market internally by bringing back competitive intelligence and emerging use cases; and building the life sciences GTM engine by defining partner evaluation criteria, shaping external messaging, and developing operating infrastructure for team and business scaling.
You will need to be technically fluent and credibly discuss foundation models, R&D workflows, and deployment considerations with both business and scientific stakeholders. You will work alongside research and engineering teams on evaluations, proofs of concept, benchmarks, and deployment planning.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 10+ years in business development, partnerships, or corporate development in pharma, biotech, or life sciences technology, with a track record of revenue-generating deals
- 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 how pharma and biotech companies evaluate, buy, and partner on R&D technology
- High technical and scientific fluency; understanding of foundation models and their translation into R&D workflows; ability to work credibly with scientists and engineers
- Demonstrated success structuring and personally negotiating complex agreements with senior executives (R&D collaborations, platform licensing deals, multi-year deals with interlocking terms)
- Experience leading cross-functional teams across Product, Engineering, Legal, and Finance from agreement structuring through signature and delivery
- Relationships with R&D, computational, and data science leaders at pharma and biotech companies; track record of sourcing own opportunities
- Experience at early-stage or growth-stage company where you helped build the motion rather than run an established one
