Head of Startups & Venture Capital (AI)

Location: Hybrid in San Mateo, CA / San Francisco, CA

On-target earnings: $360K–$400K, plus equity.

Company

Fireworks AI provides a platform for building, training, and serving specialized AI models across text, image, embedding, audio, and multimodal workloads. The company is a Series D business backed by major investors and founded by the team behind PyTorch.

What you will do

• Define and own the startup and venture strategy, including target segments, partner tiers, programs, and goals for pipeline, activation, and revenue.
• Build and scale the Startup Program with technical programming, go-to-market benefits, credits, and paths from self-serve usage to committed contracts.
• Develop relationships with venture firms, accelerators, incubators, platform teams, founders, and portfolio companies.
• Run portfolio partnerships, including perks and credits agreements, office hours, technical workshops, founder dinners, and AI infrastructure briefings.
• Represent Fireworks at demo days, accelerator cohorts, hackathons, panels, and founder communities.
• Track program economics and impact, report to GTM leadership, and bring founder and investor feedback to Product and company leadership.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in startup partnerships, venture capital, business development, or GTM roles at a cloud, developer, or AI infrastructure company.
• Established network across top-tier venture firms, accelerators, and founders.
• Proven ability to convert ecosystem relationships into measurable pipeline, product adoption, and revenue.
• Experience designing and running startup programs involving credits, perks, technical enablement, economics, and accountability.
• Technical fluency sufficient to discuss open-source models, inference performance, fine-tuning, and cost trade-offs with founders and CTOs.
• Ability to operate in a high-growth environment where the playbook is still being written and to build and execute the plan.
• Strong cross-functional partnership skills across Sales, Marketing, Product, Developer Relations, and Finance.
• Genuine enthusiasm for founders and early-stage builders.

Nice to have

• Experience running a startup or VC program at a hyperscaler, AI lab, or developer platform.
• Prior experience as a VC investor, platform lead at a venture firm, or founder or early employee at a venture-backed startup.
• Existing relationships with AI-focused funds, accelerators, and founder communities.
• Background in a technical, product, or developer relations role.

Culture & Benefits

• Work on AI infrastructure, including low-latency inference and scalable model serving.
• Collaborate with engineers and AI researchers on bleeding-edge technology.
• High ownership and direct impact in a fast-growing environment with minimal bureaucracy.
• Equity included in the compensation package.
• Inclusive, equal-opportunity workplace committed to diversity.