Senior Director, Commercial Business Development

About the role

This is the first senior commercial sales hire at XTAM. You will own the commercial pipeline end to end across the full range of offerings we bring to market: custom AI builds, multi-quarter transformation programs, productized agent and infrastructure engagements, and the PE portfolio motion. You will sell into enterprise direct and into PE-backed portfolio companies, often through firm-level relationships with the PE itself.

You will not inherit a lead list. You will not have an SDR team. You prospect, qualify, shape, sell, and close. This role is built for someone senior, hands-on, and hungry — a hunter who can credibly walk a CTO through a real conversation about agents, retrieval, evals, and integration without a sales engineer in the room, and who can sit across from a PE operating partner and turn a portfolio overview into warm intros by the end of the quarter.

What you will own

• A commercial pipeline across direct enterprise, PE-backed mid-market portcos, and channel-driven opportunities.
• Outbound prospecting end to end — cold email, LinkedIn, network activation, event presence, partner intros.
• The PE channel — relationships at the operating partner, value creation, and portfolio support level, with the goal of converting firm-level access into portfolio company introductions.
• Scoping and shaping in partnership with technical leadership. You own the BD half of capture; delivery owns scoping and proposal craft.
• BD operations — CRM discipline, pipeline reviews, accurate forecasting, win/loss discipline.
• Vertical positioning across the industries where XTAM has shipped (education, fintech, healthcare, engineering) and qualifying into adjacent ones.
• Industry presence at AI, data, and PE-focused events where actual buyers show up.

Responsibilities

• Carry and own the commercial revenue number.
• Run outbound prospecting against enterprise and PE-portco target lists you help build and refine.
• Develop and maintain PE firm-level relationships with the explicit goal of converting them into portfolio company introductions.
• Run the full deal cycle: discovery, shaping, proposal, negotiation, close, and clean handoff to delivery.
• Partner with technical leadership on solution scoping, SOW development, and competitive positioning.
• Maintain a clean CRM, accurate forecast, and weekly operational rhythm with leadership.
• Represent XTAM at industry conferences, PE-focused events, and customer engagements.
• Build the commercial team over time as pipeline justifies it.

Required experience

• 10+ years in B2B enterprise or mid-market sales, with at least five years selling complex services — consulting, custom software builds, AI/ML implementations, or transformation programs. Not pure SaaS.
• Verifiable track record of carrying and hitting a number in a hunter role with no SDR support. You have prospected your own pipeline before and you can do it again.
• A real, working rolodex of CTOs, CDOs, VPs of Engineering or Data, and operating partners at PE firms. We will reference-check this directly.
• Technical fluency. You are not an engineer, but you can credibly position agentic AI, retrieval, evals, computer vision, LLM applications, and integration architecture to a technical buyer without coaching.
• Comfort selling custom services — scoping ambiguous work, pricing on value, and shaping proposals that delivery can actually execute.
• Hunter mindset. You prospect daily. You do not wait for inbound. You do not need a lead list to feel productive.
• Operator presence. You can run discovery with a Series E CTO in the morning and a PE-backed portfolio CEO in the afternoon and switch register cleanly.

Bonus

• Direct PE channel experience — you have sold through PE firms, with active relationships at the operating partner or value creation level.
• Track record at a consulting, services, or custom software firm where every sale was built bespoke.
• Vertical depth in fintech, healthcare, education, or engineering services.
• Experience standing up commercial GTM at an early-stage services firm and scaling it.
• Existing AI/ML, data, or analytics product or services sales background.

Compensation

• Competitive base salary.
• Uncapped commission on closed commercial revenue.
• Full benefits package.