Business Development Lead
About Arena Intelligence
Arena Intelligence is the open platform for evaluating how AI models perform in the real world. Created by researchers from UC Berkeley’s SkyLab, our mission is to measure and advance the frontier of AI for real-world use.
Millions of people use Arena Intelligence each month to explore how frontier systems perform — and we use our community’s feedback to build transparent, rigorous, and human-centered model evaluations. Leading enterprises and AI labs rely on our evaluations to understand real-world reliability, alignment, and impact. Our leaderboards are the gold standard for AI performance — trusted by leaders across the AI community and shaping the global conversation on model reliability and progress.
We’re a team of researchers, engineers, academics, and builders from places like UC Berkeley, Google, Stanford, DeepMind, and Discord. We seek truth, move fast, and value craftsmanship, curiosity, and impact over hierarchy. We’re building a company where thoughtful, curious people from all backgrounds can do their best work. Everyone on our team is a deep expert in their field — our office radiates excellence, energy, and focus.
About the Role
This is a senior individual contributor role for a closer who thrives on autonomy. You will own the full lifecycle of revenue generation—from navigating complex technical stakeholders to structuring and closing seven-figure contracts.
You will be responsible for ensuring Arena meets and exceeds its annual revenue and consumption targets by deeply embedding our evaluation infrastructure into the workflows of the world's most advanced AI companies.
Core Responsibilities
Strategic Account Growth & Execution
Own the Model Lab Relationships: Serve as the primary business lead for top global model labs, managing the relationship from research lead to procurement.
Drive Revenue Expansion: Expand revenue across modalities (text, code, multimodal, vision, auto-eval) by aggressively aligning our eval programs with each lab’s training and research roadmaps.
Strategic Enterprise Expansion: Identify and close select opportunities to bring LMArena’s eval capabilities to high-value enterprise accounts (e.g., Salesforce, IBM, ServiceNow) seeking to evaluate internal or vendor models.
Secure Market Presence: Negotiate co-release and marketing rights for every major lab partnership to ensure LMArena retains mindshare as the industry standard.
Lifecycle Management: Own contract renewals, upsells, and expansions, ensuring forward visibility into multi-quarter revenue commitments.
Forecasting, Deal Structuring & Strategy
Pipeline Hygiene: Maintain rigorous revenue forecasts that tie directly to delivery schedules, consumption pacing, and renewal cycles.
Deal Architecture: Design and enforce pricing frameworks that balance predictability (committed contracts) with flexibility (usage-based consumption).
Cross-Functional Alignment: Collaborate with Delivery and Product teams to ensure evaluation capacity, quality, and timing are aligned with customer expectations.
New Product GTM: Ramp up on net new Eval or Data Products and build the strategy to sell them into existing and net new relationships.
What We Look For
10+ Years of Business Development / Sales: You have a proven track record of selling complex technical infrastructure or data products as a top-performing individual contributor.
Proven Closer: You have a history of personally closing seven-figure deals. You are comfortable navigating procurement at large organizations and negotiating complex terms without hand-holding.
AI Fluency: You have ideally worked in AI and understand the stack (Training vs. Inference, RLHF, Benchmarking). You can credible discuss model performance needs with research scientists.
High Agency: You are a self-starter who can operate without a playbook. You effectively manage your own pipeline, forecasting, and deal hygiene.
Operational Rigor: You understand how to align sales promises with delivery reality, working closely with finance and product to ensure deals are profitable and executable
What we offer
We offer competitive compensation and equity aligned to the markets where our team members are based. The base salary range will depend on the candidate’s permanent work location.
Comprehensive health and wellness benefits, including medical, dental, vision, and additional support programs.
The opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI with a small, mission-driven team
A culture that values transparency, trust, and community impact
Come help build the space where anyone can explore and help shape the future of AI.
Arena Intelligence provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. We are committed to a diverse and inclusive workforce and welcome people from all backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and abilities.