Business Development Lead

Navi captures everything a pilot sees and hears and turns it into automated debrief intelligence. The platform is live at flight schools, business jet operators, and the U.S. Air Force — and demand is accelerating. You're the person who turns that demand into deployments.About the roleThis is a founding business development role. You own how Navi expands across the aviation market — airlines, charter operators, and the training centers that produce the next generation of pilots. You own the full cycle: sourcing the relationship, running the pitch, closing the deal, and standing up the deployment that follows.Navi is deployed at Embry-Riddle, Purdue, UND, Sling Pilot Academy, and the United States Air Force. The market is wide open and the product is proven. What we need now is someone to go take it.You won't be handed a playbook. You'll write it — and then build the team that runs it.What you'll doOwn the full business development cycle from first contact to signed deal to live deployment — across airlines, private jet operators, and flight training centersBuild and manage a pipeline of aviation customers — identify the right targets, get in the room, and move deals to closeRun pitches and product demos for operators, training directors, and aviation executives — translating Navi's capabilities into outcomes they care aboutNegotiate and close commercial agreements, then partner with the team to make every deployment a successRepresent Navi in person at customer sites, industry events, and on the road — this is a relationship business and you'll be where the customers areHire and build the business development team as we scale, setting the standard for how Navi sellsAbout you5+ years of professional experience building and operating production infrastructureYou've dealt with user data and processing at genuine scale. Not 1,000 users. 100,000 users and 100 requests per secondDeep, hands‑on AWS experience: you know the services, the failure modes, and the billYou've built observability from scratch: monitoring, alerting, on‑call, incident responseYou've shipped automatic failover and fallback mechanisms and lived with them in productionYou treat cost as an engineering metric and have materially reduced cloud spend at scaleIdeally you've carried infrastructure from the seed stage of a company through SeriesC. If you come from big tech, you've also worked early stageStrong general backend skills; you're an engineer first, infrastructure specialist secondYou write things down: documentation and runbooks that let others operate what you builtNice to haveFamiliarity with aviation systems, avionics data formats, or defense technology environments.Why this role mattersPilots trust their lives to the systems in front of them. When an instructor opens a debrief or a squadron reviews a sortie, the platform has to be up, fast, and right. Your work is the difference between a tool people try and a system they rely on.What you'll getEarly‑stage equity — real ownership in a category‑defining companyFlight training — earn your pilot's license and sell with true domain expertiseImpact you can see — the deals you close put Navi in cockpits at airlines, flight schools, and the U.S. Air ForceA role that scales into commercial leadership as we growHow we workFind a way. We don't wait for permission or perfect information. Ideas come from anywhere regardless of title. Figure it out, ship it, iterate.Creativity over control. First principles over process. We'd rather have a creative solution that's 80% right today than a perfect one next quarter.Update fast. Come in with a hypothesis, throw it away when the data says otherwise. Ego has no place here.Intensity with focus. We work hard because the mission demands it. Clarity on what matters is how we make that sustainable.#J-18808-Ljbffr