Business Development Lead

About Goodfire

Behind our name: Like fire, AI holds the potential for both immense benefit and significant risk. Just as mastering fire transformed human history, we believe the safe and intentional development of AI will shape the future of our species. Our goal is to tame this new fire.

Goodfire is an AI interpretability research company focused on understanding and intentionally designing advanced AI systems. We believe advances in interpretability will unlock the next frontier of safe and powerful foundation models and that deep research breakthroughs are necessary to make this possible.

Everything we do is in service of that mission. We move fast, take ownership, and constantly push to improve. We believe in acting today rather than tomorrow. We care deeply about the success of the organization and put the team above ourselves.

Goodfire is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco with a team of the world’s top interpretability researchers and engineers from organizations like OpenAI and DeepMind. We’ve raised $57M from investors like Menlo, Lightspeed and Anthropic and work with customers including Arc Institute, Mayo Clinic, and Rakuten.

The role

We are at a significant inflection point in helping enterprises deploy their models into production by applying interpretability to make them safe, reliable, and steerable. We are seeking our first Business Development Lead to own our partnership pipeline generation. You should be a focused operator who can identify partnership opportunities, drive outreach, and thrive in ambiguity. You should be able to get the CEO a meeting with any potential customer.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own customer and partner outreach (emails, events, contacts) to generate leads
• Research and identify potential partners, customers, and markets
• Support creation of materials (pitches, proposals, decks) to share with leads to drive deal closure and growth

Who you are

Goodfire is looking for individuals who embody our values and share our deep commitment to making interpretability accessible. We care deeply about building a team who shares our values:

Put mission and team first

All we do is in service of our mission. We trust each other, deeply care about the success of the organization, and choose to put our team above ourselves.

Improve constantly

We are constantly looking to improve every piece of the business. We proactively critique ourselves and others in a kind and thoughtful way that translates to practical improvements in the organization. We are pragmatic and consistently implement the obvious fixes that work.

Take ownership and initiative

There are no bystanders here. We proactively identify problems and take full responsibility over getting a strong result. We are self-driven, own our mistakes, and feel deep responsibility over what we’re building.

Action today

We have a small amount of time to do something incredibly hard and meaningful. The pace and intensity of the organization is high. If we can take action today or tomorrow, we will choose to do it today.

If you share our values and have at least two years of relevant experience, we encourage you to apply and join us in shaping the future of how we design AI systems.

What we're looking for

Required experience

• 3+ years of experience in sales, business development, or partnerships at a high-growth startup
• Demonstrated scrappiness, willingness to persist in ambiguity, ability to learn quickly, and a generalist “can-do” mindset
• An AI native with deep experience communicating technical concepts to customers and internal stakeholders, a strong familiarity with the field of interpretability, and an excitement about the future of AI safety and alignment
• Past experience with account based marketing (ABM) a plus, though not required

Compensation & Benefits

This role offers market competitive salary, equity, and competitive benefits. More importantly, you'll have the opportunity to work on groundbreaking technology with a world-class team on the critical path to ensuring a safe and beneficial future for humanity.

The expected salary range for this position is $100,000-200,000 USD.