Company: Alibaba Cloud

Location: Sunnyvale, CA 94085 (in office)

Job Type: Full-time

Salary: $156,000 - $255,600 a year

Job Summary

Alibaba Cloud is seeking an enterprise-level Business Development Manager to drive growth and infrastructure adoption among US-based AI startups and AI-native companies. In this role, you will position Alibaba Cloud’s full generative AI stack—including our Tongyi Qianwen (Qwen) open-weight models, Platform for AI (PAI), and GPU-optimized instances—as the optimal infrastructure for cutting-edge AI innovators. You will own senior executive relationships, navigate technical evaluations against Western hyperscalers, and act as a key driver in the U.S. GenAI ecosystem.

Benefits & Perks

• Competitive base salary ($156,000 - $255,600/year) scaled to experience.
• Comprehensive health, retirement, and discretionary compensation programs.

Required Qualifications (Must Have)

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience).
• Experience: 3+ years of experience in a customer-facing technical sales, solutions engineering, or developer relations role, preferably within cloud, infrastructure, or AI/ML domains.
• Technical Knowledge: Deep understanding of modern AI stacks, including familiarity with transformers, fine-tuning, quantization, vector databases, LangChain/LlamaIndex, inference optimization, and MLOps tools.
• Communication: Proven ability to articulate complex technical machine learning concepts clearly to both technical founders/CTOs and non-technical business audiences.
• Travel: Ability and willingness to travel extensively across the U.S. (~50% of the time) to meet customers face-to-face.

Preferred Qualifications (Nice to Have)

• Direct experience working within, or advising, an AI-native startup ecosystem.
• Hands-on experience deploying and scaling models on major cloud platforms (Alibaba Cloud, AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Familiarity with open-weight models, model-serving frameworks (vLLM, TGI), and the performance/cost trade-offs of inference.
• Existing network within the U.S. venture capital (VC), tech incubator (e.g., Y Combinator), and AI startup communities.

Key Responsibilities

• Relationship Management: Build and own strategic relationships with AI-native founders, CTOs, engineers, and product leaders across the U.S.
• Architecture Alignment: Evaluate and understand the technical architectures and business models of AI startups (LLM fine-tuning, RAG pipelines, AI agent orchestration).
• Product Positioning: Articulate the business and technical value of Alibaba Cloud’s AI infrastructure stack to ensure cost-efficient training and low-latency inference.
• Account Growth: Drive customer adoption from initial technical proof-of-concept through to scaled production usage, focusing on consumption metrics (GPU hours, model hosting, API calls).
• Cross-functional Collaboration: Partner with internal Solutions Architects and AI specialists to design tailored, competitive infrastructure solutions that solve startup pain points.
• Competitive Strategy: Help startups compare Alibaba Cloud vs. competitors (AWS Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, GCP Vertex AI) based on openness, pricing, and architectural flexibility.
• Ecosystem Representation: Represent the company at major tech conferences, startup incubators, and VC events.
• Product Feedback: Serve as the voice of the U.S. developer community, conveying technical feedback back to product teams to optimize tooling and documentation.

Job Type: Full-time

Pay: $156,000.00 - $255,600.00 per year

Application Question(s):

• Do you have at least 3 years of experience in a customer-facing technical sales, solutions engineering, or developer relations role, preferably within cloud, infrastructure, or AI/ML domains?
• Do you have experience working in a startup environment, building business opportunities from 0 to 1, or developing resources within the AI / cloud / technology ecosystem?

Education:

• Bachelor's (Required)

Language:

• English (Preferred)
• Chinese (Preferred)

Work Location: In person