Senior Dealmaker - AI

As a Senior Dealmaker at Mysten Labs, you shape and lead AI partnerships for Walrus, a decentralized storage network built to serve AI agents that need infrastructure to retain context, handle sensitive information, and maintain a trustworthy record of their actions. Working closely with the Head of Partnerships and Walrus product and engineering leadership, you'll identify where Walrus and complementary capabilities like confidential compute create the greatest value, build relationships with the right partners, and structure agreements that lead to meaningful integrations and adoption.

What you'll do

• Shape our AI partnership strategy by developing a clear perspective on where Walrus becomes essential infrastructure for AI applications and agents, and identify the partners, use cases, and market developments that should guide our investment of time and resources.
• Originate consequential partnerships by building relationships with founders, executives, and technical decision-makers at foundation model companies, AI platforms, agent frameworks, data platforms, and adjacent infrastructure providers, creating opportunities before there is an established partnership motion.
• Define the opportunity alongside the partner by understanding how partners build, what their customers need, and where our technology can solve a meaningful problem, working with product and engineering leadership to shape joint offerings, integration proposals, and commercial models.
• Structure and close complex deals by leading negotiations involving technical integrations, joint product development, distribution, and commercial agreements, and navigating competing priorities to create structures that give both organizations a compelling reason to commit.
• Deliver integrations and adoption by owning relationships beyond signing, aligning teams on scope, resources, and milestones, resolving obstacles, and keeping partnerships moving toward implementation, launch, and sustained usage.
• Influence across the organization by bringing partner and market insights into product, engineering, marketing, and leadership discussions, making clear recommendations, surfacing tradeoffs, and building alignment around opportunities that require investment across teams.
• Establish a repeatable approach by turning early wins into sharper partner selection criteria, stronger deal structures, and more effective execution, raising the quality of partnership work through sound judgment, shared learning, and mentorship.

What you bring

• Substantial experience in strategic partnerships or business development, typically 10 to 15+ years, with demonstrated ownership of strategically significant relationships in AI, data infrastructure, or developer platforms.
• Deep engagement in the AI ecosystem, including strong relationships with founders, executives, and product and technical leaders at relevant companies.
• A proven record of independently originating, structuring, negotiating, and closing complex partnerships that produced meaningful integrations, joint offerings, distribution, or adoption.
• The judgment to identify which opportunities deserve investment, articulate a compelling partnership thesis, and walk away when the strategic or commercial fit is weak.
• Strong product instincts and technical fluency, with the ability to engage engineers on architectures and agentic workflows, uncover a partner's underlying needs, and connect technical capabilities to business value.
• Credibility in the startup community and firsthand experience building with limited structure, resources, or established processes, with opportunities you personally created and brought to market.
• The ability to think at enterprise scale while executing with startup urgency, comfortable navigating executive stakeholders and handling the details needed to get an integration live.
• A track record of influencing senior stakeholders and aligning product, engineering, legal, and commercial teams without relying on formal authority.
• Creative commercial judgment, a bias for action, and accountability for outcomes through implementation and adoption.
• Curiosity about decentralized infrastructure and the ability to become fluent quickly; prior Web3 experience is welcome, and substantial AI ecosystem experience is essential.
• High ethical standards, direct communication, and comfort adapting as the product and market evolve.
• Ability to travel approximately 20% of the time, including internationally.

What we offer

• Location: San Francisco Bay Area preferred; we may consider exceptional candidates elsewhere who are deeply embedded in the AI ecosystem.

About Mysten Labs

Mysten Labs is building foundational blockchain infrastructure to accelerate the adoption of decentralized protocols. The team is backed by top Silicon Valley venture funds including Jump Crypto, Andreessen Horowitz, Binance Labs, Redpoint, and others, and is remote-first, hiring across the world.