Company: Alibaba Cloud
Location: Sunnyvale, CA (in office)
Position Type: Full-time
About the Role
Are you passionate about the future of Generative AI? Do you thrive at the intersection of deep technical architecture and high-growth business strategy?
Alibaba Cloud is expanding its US presence to support the next wave of AI innovation. As our AI-Native Business Development Manager, you will be the driving force behind our Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) and AI infrastructure growth. You will own relationships with the brightest minds in the US AI ecosystem—founders, CTOs, and ML engineers—helping them leverage Alibaba Cloud’s cutting-edge AI stack, including our industry-leading Tongyi Qianwen (Qwen) models, Platform for AI (PAI), and optimized GPU infrastructure.
If you want to shape the global AI landscape, build deep VC connections, and help startups scale from proof-of-concept to production, this is your playground.
Key Responsibilities
- Build the Ecosystem: Map, engage, and build trusted relationships with AI-native founders, CTOs, and product leaders across the U.S. startup landscape.
- Deconstruct Tech Architectures: Understand the technical needs of AI startups—spanning LLM fine-tuning, RAG pipelines, AI agent orchestration, and cost-effective inference.
- Position the AI Stack: Champion Alibaba Cloud’s AI infrastructure (PAI, GPU/ML-optimized instances, vector storage, and serverless inference) as the premier choice for price-to-performance and innovation.
- Drive Consumption & Scale: Lead startups from initial technical evaluation to scaled production, focusing on AI-specific workloads (GPU hours, model hosting, API calls).
- Architect Custom Solutions: Partner closely with Solutions Architects and AI Specialists to design tailormade, cost-efficient infrastructure solutions that solve real startup pain points.
- Own Competitive Positioning: Confidently articulate Alibaba Cloud’s unique advantages (openness, flexibility, global footprint) against Western hyperscalers (AWS Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, GCP Vertex AI).
- Be the Face of Alibaba Cloud AI: Represent the brand at major AI conferences (NeurIPS, TechCrunch Disrupt), top incubators (Y Combinator, a16z events), and VC partner meetings.
- Voice of the Customer: Channel technical feedback and product gaps from the US developer community directly back to our core product teams to continuously improve developer experience.
What We’re Looking For
Required Qualifications:
- Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Experience: 3+ years in a highly technical, customer-facing role (Technical Sales, Solutions Engineering, Account Management, or Developer Relations) within the cloud, infrastructure, or AI/ML space.
- AI/ML Domain Expertise: Solid understanding of modern AI stacks, including transformers, fine-tuning, quantization, vector databases, LangChain/LlamaIndex, and MLOps tools.
- Communication Mastery: Exceptional ability to translate complex machine learning infrastructure concepts into compelling business value for both deep tech engineers and business executives.
- Startup Agility: Proactive, self-starter mentality comfortable navigating ambiguous, fast-paced, founder-led environments.
- Mobility: Willingness to travel extensively (~50% of the time) to connect face-to-face with customers across the U.S.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Direct experience working within or advising an AI-native startup.
- Hands-on experience deploying and serving models on major cloud platforms (Alibaba Cloud, AWS, GCP, Azure).
- Deep familiarity with open-weight models, model-serving frameworks (vLLM, TGI), and the economic trade-offs of inference.
- An active builders’ mindset—you regularly experiment with open models (Llama, Mistral, Qwen), follow arXiv papers, or build side projects with AI agents.
- An existing, robust network within the U.S. AI, VC, and incubator ecosystem.
What We Offer
- Compensation: The base pay range for this position is expected to be between $156,000/year and $255,600/year. Base pay offered may vary depending on market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.
- Impact: The unique opportunity to build a massive US-based AI ecosystem backed by the global scale and infrastructure of Alibaba Cloud.
- Culture: A collaborative, tech-first, and highly entrepreneurial environment in the heart of Silicon Valley.