Strategic Business Development Lead

Company: Samaya AI
Location: Mountain View
Posted on: April 1, 2026

Job Description:

Role Samaya AI is building the first Expert Intelligence platform for Financial Services. Our users create teams of AI agents that supercharge financial research, discovery and analysis. We’re a high-growth, world-class AI team seeing incredible product traction with leading financial institutions. Role Overview The Strategic Business Development Lead will bring deep financial domain expertise ( investment research, asset management, trading, investment banking, risk, etc.) to advance Samaya’s adoption across key institutions. This role is central in helping customers unlock outcomes / use cases and integrate Samaya’s powerful AI Agents into their workflows. You will: Partner with Account Executives and sales leadership to support the full sales cycle — from discovery to closing — by bringing domain expertise, technical fluency, and consultative insight. Engage senior stakeholders (portfolio managers, heads of research, quant leads, CIOs) in deep conversations about how Samaya can transform current workflows (e.g. due diligence, modeling, sourcing signals, thematic research, scenario analysis). Lead tailored demos and workshops in financial workflows (e.g. valuation, deal modeling, stress testing, sector analysis, risk-scenario simulation), validating use cases and aligning to stakeholder pain points. Serve as a trusted advisor: educate customers on AI’s potential (and limitations) in financial settings, and help them design adoption pathways. Capture feedback and act as the “Voice of the Customer,” influencing product roadmap, prompt engineering strategies, domain expansions, and sales positioning. Collaborate with marketing and enablement to produce thought leadership, case studies, and domain-specific collateral that resonates with finance audiences. Stay abreast of trends in finance, fintech, AI, and the competitive landscape. Provide competitive intelligence and market insights to GTM and product teams. Occasionally travel (customer visits, industry events) to strengthen relationships and market presence. What You'll Need (Qualifications & Experience) Required: 3 years of experience in a financial expert role (e.g. investment banking, equity/credit research, asset management, trading desk, quant analytics, portfolio management). Deep understanding of financial workflows: modeling, valuation, forecasting, risk management, company analysis, event-driven theme evaluation, etc. Proven ability to engage and influence senior decision-makers (C-suite, heads of research, CIOs), especially in finance. Excellent presentation and communication skills — able to translate AI capabilities into customer vernacular and deliver custom demos. Ability to translate ambiguous business challenges into concrete technical/AI-enabled solutions. A proactive, self-driven, and flexible mindset — you’ll be operating in a fast-moving startup environment. Comfort working across teams (Product, ML, Engineering, Sales) and serving as the domain translator. Preferred: Advanced degree (MBA, CFA, CQF, MSc Finance, etc.). Prior experience in risk, quant, or trading systems. B2B sales, pre-sales, or solution engineering experience in fintech or deep-tech companies. Compensation The cash compensation range for this role is $159,000 - $242,000 OTE 70/30 split. Variable compensation components will be tied to sales outcomes / success. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above. Equity may also be considered as part of the overall compensation package. Benefits Comprehensive health insurance coverage (medical, dental, vision, and short-term disability) to support your health and wellbeing Support your long-term financial well-being with 401K Flexibility to rest and recharge with unlimited PTO Travel budget to provide opportunities for learning and collaboration by attending conferences, visitings other offices, and more Office equipment allowance to enhance the comfort of your workspace Hybrid setup that offers flexibility in where you work, while staying aligned with our customers and supported locations Inclusive Hiring Interview Accommodations: We are committed to ensuring an equitable selection process for everyone and welcome applicants from varied backgrounds to enrich our team. If you require accommodations or adjustments during our recruitment process, please inform us. Equal Opportunity Employer: We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy and gender identity), national origin, political affiliation, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, genetic information, age, membership in an employee organization, retaliation, parental status, military service, or other non-merit factor. Visa Sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. If we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this. About Samaya Samaya builds Expert AI Agents that turn information from the global financial market into investment conviction. The global financial market is the largest and most valuable information ecosystem in the world, connecting billions of people, influencing every type of productive human activity, and driving tens of trillions of dollars of value. At its core is investment decision-making: identifying areas of productive activity, allocating resources, carried out by millions of people across the globe. But that process is at a breaking point. The past two decades have brought an exponential increase in market complexity: more information sources, more asset types, more disruptive themes like AI reshaping every corner of the market. For investors, this means exponentially more depth, breadth, and speed required on every decision. The response is a forced tradeoff: zoom in on a sector or basket of companies and manage the flood, but lose sight of adjacent dynamics that move markets. Or zoom out to track broad themes, but lose the needle-in-a-haystack details that drive precise decisions. No market sector evolves in isolation, and this lack of a simultaneously zoomed-in and zoomed-out picture costs hundreds of billions in missed or suboptimal investment decisions every year. Samaya was founded to reimagine investment decision-making across the global financial market. General-purpose AI can’t reason about cause and effect across complex economic systems, embed firm-specific context, or execute reliably over long-horizon workflows. We built something different: a purpose-built AI system combining proprietary financial reasoning models, a long-horizon execution engine with persistent memory, and full auditability. Built by a team from Google DeepMind, Meta, Microsoft, and Stanford with 100 papers and 50k citations, it achieves 98% accuracy on financial reasoning tasks where generic LLMs reach 53%. The result is AI that learns how each investor thinks and seamlessly takes them from information to conviction. Our user base has scaled to 10,000, with partnerships spanning top financial institutions worldwide, including Morgan Stanley. We’re backed by $43.5M in Series A funding led by NEA, with investors including Eric Schmidt, NVIDIA, Databricks, Yann LeCun, Jeff Dean, Marty Chavez, and Mark Cuban. Our Operating Principles Put Users first. Our users rely on us to do their jobs. We exist because our users trust us to help them achieve their goals. In return for this trust users place in us, we keep their needs as our top priority. Win as a collective. We are high achievers with a drive to succeed. We build strong bonds over this shared drive. We dive in to help when one of us needs it. We’re kind to each other and boost each other to succeed and grow professionally and personally. We build trust with each other by making commitments and consistently delivering on them. This trust means we genuinely support each other, embracing feedback as a tool for growth and improvement. We win by operating this way, as one team. Focus and iterate quickly. Bias for action makes us build and learn quickly. Iterating fast requires clarity on what outcomes we are targeting and why. Prioritizing the important things, taking full ownership and initiative, making fast initial progress, and rapid iterations lead to the best outcomes. Innovate Relentlessly. We pursue novel insights, challenging the status quo and reimagining how things are done. We aren’t attached to the past when improving our product and how we work in the future. We actively invest time in innovation, thinking “outside the box” to consistently raise our standards. Prioritize Outcomes over Egos . We are committed not to a person, an idea, or an opinion but to continuously making progress to our goals. Sometimes, our goals are ambiguous; in those moments, we iterate, learn, and move on to the next inquiry. We ask the tough questions with kindness, dropping our egos in our pursuit of evidence. For our business goals, we learn from our users. For our scientific goals, our understanding is built through rigorous experimentation, research, and observation. For our personal goals, we embrace candid feedback and collaborative learning to guide our progress.

Keywords: Samaya AI, Santa Rosa , Strategic Business Development Lead, Accounting, Auditing , Mountain View, California