Head of Business Development

The Opportunity

Lumai is opening a permanent base in North America, next to the customers who decide how AI infrastructure gets built. Iris Nova is in the hands of early evaluators, and the company's next step is volume, which means the region needs someone on the ground who can turn the ecosystem into partnerships and deployments. This is the hire that makes North America a real market rather than a travel schedule.

The Role

You will own Lumai's relationships and pipeline in North America, and be the face of the company in the region. You will build relationships with hyperscalers, neoclouds, AI model developers, system integrators and data centre operators, map the ecosystem and its decision-makers, and run the full business development cycle from first engagement to long-term partnership. As the region grows, you will build and lead Lumai's North American business development team.

What is genuinely hard about this is that you are introducing a new kind of computer to the most conservative procurement processes in the industry, with no reference accounts yet and a product line still moving. Most of the organisations you need are already committed to an incumbent architecture, so you will be opening doors on technical credibility and the strength of the numbers, and holding relationships through long evaluation cycles without a track record in the region to point at.

By month six, you will have a mapped account plan for the North American ecosystem, working relationships with the partners that matter, and at least one engagement you opened sitting in evaluation.

What You'll Do

• Build and own strategic relationships across the North American AI and data infrastructure ecosystem.

• Map the region's organisations and decision-makers, and open the doors that matter.

• Lead engagement with hyperscalers, system integrators, neoclouds, AI model developers and data centre operators.

• Run the full business development cycle, from first meeting to long-term partnership.

• Turn market intelligence into Lumai's regional go-to-market plan, and feed what you learn into product and strategy.

• Represent Lumai at the major AI and compute conferences, including speaking engagements.

• Work with Lumai's leadership on strategic partnerships and future fundraising.

What We're Looking For

Must-have

• Ten or more years in semiconductors, data centres or high-performance computing, including at least five in business development or strategic account management.

• A deep understanding of the AI compute landscape: hyperscalers, cloud providers and AI model developers, and where data centre infrastructure is going.

• An existing network across North American AI and data centre organisations.

• A record of driving partnerships across organisations, with engineering and commercial teams on both sides.

• Based in the Bay Area, willing to travel across North America and to our UK headquarters.

Strong preference for

• Experience scaling a deep-tech venture through its first commercial deployments.

• Working knowledge of data centre infrastructure at the CPU, GPU and networking level.

About Lumai

Lumai is the optical compute company building the next generation of AI infrastructure. Spun out of optics research at the University of Oxford in 2021, we compute with light instead of electrons. Our 3D optical technology carries out the matrix multiplications at the heart of AI inside beams of light travelling through free space, which lets it go beyond the limits of both silicon GPUs and integrated photonics.

In April 2026 we launched Iris Nova, the world's first optical computing system to run billion-parameter large language models in real time, using up to 90% less energy than conventional GPU-based systems. Iris Nova, the first server in the family, is now available for evaluation by hyperscalers, neoclouds, enterprises and research institutions. Aura and Tetra will follow.

Our work won the Falling Walls Award for Science Breakthrough of the Year 2025 and 'Best Overall Technology' at the OCP Future Technologies Symposium. We are headquartered in Oxford.

Why Lumai

You'll work on a new kind of computer. Optical computing for AI has been promised for decades. We have a working system running real models, and the hard part left is taking it to volume.

Your work ships. We are moving from first product to volume production, so what you build this year goes into the servers our customers run.

You'll work across disciplines. Optical engineers, machine learning researchers, and hardware and software engineers solve problems together. You will learn things that don't appear on your job description.

The work matters beyond Lumai. AI's appetite for energy is one of the defining constraints of the next decade. Our mission is sustainable intelligence at global scale: AI that is faster, cheaper to run and far less power-hungry.

You'll join early. You'll have a real say in how we build the product, the team and the way we work.

Equal Opportunity

Lumai is an equal opportunity employer. We make hiring decisions based on skills, experience and potential, and we welcome applications from people of all backgrounds. If you need an adjustment at any stage of the hiring process, let us know and we will do our best to support you.