Essential AI is building an open platform to fuel and accelerate AI breakthroughs globally. Our open models, robust tooling, reproducible pipelines, and evaluation frameworks are designed for collaboration and contribution, empowering others to build, iterate, and innovate faster.
Essential AI's technology and products have the means to shape AI advancements while supporting scalable and sustainable business models. Powerful AIs don't trace their origins to singular breakthroughs, but from an amalgam of improvements, incremental and large. Essential AI creates the ideal environment to catalyze these advancements, enabling a steady path to sustained frontier capabilities.
About the role
Essential AI is hiring its Founding Head of GTM & Commercialization to build the company’s first go-to-market and commercialization foundation. This role is responsible for translating our open-science model platform into real-world adoption through thoughtful partnerships, early customers, and ecosystem engagement without compromising research velocity and technical integrity.
In this role, you will be working closely with the founder and leadership team to define how Essential brings its technology into the world.
Lay the groundwork for early GTM and commercial design partnerships, from strategy through execution.
What you will do
Help define and execute initial business and revenue motions alongside a deeply technical team by identifying and developing business opportunities that emerge from open-weight model capabilities, open research, and developer-first infrastructure
Enable enterprise partnership opportunities driven by how Essential turns technical breakthroughs into long-term leverage without compromising our research drive and values
Build and own Essential’s developer engagement strategy: docs, tutorials, demos online and via closed community engagement events - launch and nurture developer community channels (Discord, GitHub, HuggingFace, AMAs, meetups)
Lead both repeatable offerings and more complex, multi-stakeholder engagements; turning qualified interest into well-scoped, strategically-aligned partnerships.
Instrument the funnel: early signals of model adoption, traction, and market pull
Help define long-term commercialization paths that scale alongside research progress
What we are looking for
Experience building early GTM foundation, partnerships, or revenue motions at a deeply technical company
Proven ability to scale the business side of a company through ambiguous, zero-to-one stages
Strong understanding of open-source and open-weight ecosystems and how they create durable value is a plus.
Experience operating as the connective layer between research, product, and external partners
Comfort operating without a playbook, with high ownership and low ego
Ability to work closely with technical founders, researchers, and engineers
We encourage you to apply for this position even if you don’t check all of the above requirements but want to spend time pushing on these techniques.
Essential AI commits to providing a work environment free of discrimination and harassment, as well as equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or veteran status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. You may view all of Essential AI’s recruiting notices here, including our EEO policy, recruitment scam notice, and recruitment agency policy.
What We Do
Essential AI’s mission is to deepen the partnership between humans and computers, unlocking collaborative capabilities that far exceed what could be achieved today.
To reinvent how enterprises work, we are developing full-stack AI products that quickly learn to increase productivity by automating time-consuming and monotonous workflows. For instance, our technology will make data analysts 10X faster and give business users the tools to become independent data driven decision makers themselves. It will also identify the biggest risks and suggest improvements in organizations' supply chains.
With human feedback and technical breakthroughs, our LLMs will empower users to solve progressively harder tasks and unlock critical skills, scaling the impact of organizations on society. We believe that building delightful end-user experiences requires innovating across the stack - from the UX all the way down to models that achieve the best user value per FLOP.
We are based in SF and are building a world-class multi-disciplinary team of engineers, researchers, designers, and sales and product experts who are excited to solve hard real-world AI problems. We are excited to partner with March Capital and Thrive Capital, with participation from AMD, Franklin Venture Partners, Google, KB Investment, and NVIDIA.
