Head of Business Development
Horizen Labs is a deep-tech cryptographic engineering company building privacy, zero-knowledge verification, confidential-compute, and Web3 infrastructure systems.
Projects
About Horizen Labs
Founded in April 2019, Horizen Labs develops and operates production cryptographic systems for Web3, enterprise, government, and other high-stakes environments. Its current portfolio includes Horizen, zkVerify, Kurier, Vela, and several independently identified privacy and verification products.
Skills
Candidate Availability
Required and preferred rules are kept separate and reflect the wording in the original posting.
About the Role
You will build and lead the commercial function, owning business-development strategy, pipeline development, strategic deal execution, and revenue growth. You will develop enterprise and ecosystem partnerships, shape pricing and packaging, convert pilots into recurring contracts, share market insights with Product and Engineering, pursue non-dilutive funding, represent the organization externally, and hire and lead a business-development and partnerships team.
Requirements
- 7+ years of enterprise business development, strategic partnerships, or strategic sales experience in deep tech, HPC, cloud, AI infrastructure, or complex technical platforms
- 3+ years leading a function or team
- Track record of building early-stage commercial traction, including growing frontier technology revenue or landing design partners and multi-year Fortune 500 contracts
- Experience closing complex, high-value deals with long sales cycles and stakeholders across the C-suite, R&D, and procurement
- Established network in Defense, enterprise R&D, cloud and HPC, or quantum industries
- Technical fluency in quantum computing, HPC, or advanced simulation
- Quantum experience is strongly preferred
- Experience setting strategy while personally conducting outbound work and negotiations
Responsibilities
- Set the business-development strategy, target verticals, ideal customer profiles, priority accounts, annual plan, and revenue targets
- Build and own the pipeline through outbound outreach, executive networks, events, and partner referrals
- Lead strategic deals from design partner agreements and paid pilots through multi-year platform-access and co-development contracts
- Convert pilots into recurring multi-year commercial agreements
- Build co-sell and channel partnerships with cloud providers, marketplaces, HPC vendors, systems integrators, hardware partners, universities, and national labs
- Shape pricing and packaging with Product and Finance
- Share customer, partner, and competitive insights to inform product and engineering roadmaps
- Represent Horizen Labs at conferences, industry consortia, and with analysts, investors, and government stakeholders
- Identify and secure co-development grants and government programs
- Hire and lead a business-development and partnerships team