---
title: 'Business Development at Sieve'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/business-development-sieve-san-francisco-crb7611fxcpw'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Business Development at Sieve

- **Company:** Sieve
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-09-01
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sieve/cac23b2f-c69e-4018-8925-c9f8b0562047

## Job description

## About Us

Sieve is a multi-modal lab curating the world's highest-quality training datasets — spanning video, audio, images, text, and 3D. We combine exabyte-scale data infrastructure and novel multimodal understanding techniques that push the frontier of foundation models. Video alone makes up 80% of internet traffic, and across modalities, data has become the enabling medium powering creativity, communication, gaming, AR/VR, and robotics. Sieve exists to solve the biggest bottleneck in the growth of these applications: high-quality training data.

We partner with top AI labs and did $XXM last quarter alone, as a team of ~30 people. We also raised our Series A from Tier 1 firms such as [Matrix Partners](https://matrix.vc/), [Swift Ventures](https://www.swift.vc/), [Y Combinator](https://www.ycombinator.com/), and [AI Grant](https://aigrant.com/).

## Why Now

Sieve is one of the most capital-efficient teams in AI — roughly 30 people serving the world's leading AI labs across every major data modality. You'll join early, own problems end-to-end, and watch your work ship directly into the models defining the frontier.

## About the Role

As the first business development person, you'll build and deepen relationships across frontier AI labs, emerging model companies, and the broader data ecosystem. You'll identify new labs to work with, develop relationships with additional groups inside existing customers, and recognize emerging opportunities where Sieve can help. You'll report directly to the CEO and work closely with our GMs and COO. Your job is to find the right people, create high-value conversations, shape opportunities early, and pull the right internal and external levers to help them progress. Our GMs will own commercial scoping, pricing, and closing. You'll also own the near-term strategy and execution for programs that create inbound demand, including events, conferences, ecosystem partnerships, and marketing initiatives.

## What You'll Do

- Build trusted relationships with researchers, data leaders, product teams, and executives at frontier AI labs and emerging model companies
- Identify and engage new labs while opening relationships with additional teams and buying centers inside existing customers
- Map the organizations that matter: understand who is working on which models, modalities, capabilities, and data problems
- Stay close to changes in model training, post-training, evaluations, RL environments, and multimodal research to recognize where new data needs are emerging
- Develop clear opportunity theses that connect a lab's research priorities or model limitations to Sieve's data and infrastructure capabilities
- Create and facilitate high-value conversations between external stakeholders and the appropriate Sieve GM
- Prepare internal teams with the context they need, including stakeholder maps, research priorities, customer needs, relevant Sieve capabilities, and recommended next steps
- Remain involved after the initial introduction, using relationships, follow-ups, references, events, executive engagement, and other strategic levers to help opportunities progress
- Work with the CEO, GMs, and COO to prioritize the relationships and opportunities that matter most
- Own the strategy and execution for selective programs that generate inbound demand, including executive dinners, research events, conference presence, ecosystem partnerships, content, and other creative initiatives
- Represent Sieve at industry events and in the communities where AI researchers, data leaders, founders, and investors spend time
- Build a strong view of the AI data market, including emerging customer needs, competitor activity, organizational changes at labs, and new categories Sieve should pursue
- Maintain a clear, lightweight system for tracking important relationships, active opportunities, and next steps

## Requirements

- Deep familiarity with the frontier AI lab and AI data ecosystem, with an existing network or demonstrated ability to build trusted relationships within it
- Experience in strategic business development, partnerships, investing, company-building, or another relationship-driven role in AI
- Strong understanding of how foundation models are trained and improved, including the role of pretraining, post-training, evaluations, human data, multimodal data, and RL environments
- The technical judgment to understand what makes data useful for training and to hold credible conversations with AI researchers and technical leaders
- Exceptional relationship-building skills and the judgment to know which people, organizations, and opportunities matter
- Ability to communicate fluently with researchers, founders, executives, operators, and commercial stakeholders
- High agency and comfort personally executing across relationship development, events, marketing, and other zero-to-one initiatives
- Strong organizational judgment and the ability to manage many long-term relationships
- In-person at our San Francisco HQ

## Nice to Have

- Experience at a human-data, training-data, evaluation, or AI infrastructure company
- Direct experience scoping or executing data engagements with frontier AI labs
- Previous experience working at a frontier lab, founding an AI company, or investing in the AI and data ecosystem
- Existing relationships across research, data, post-training, evaluations, procurement, and executive teams at major AI labs
- Experience with multimodal data, reinforcement learning environments, human feedback, red teaming, or model evaluations
- Experience building executive events, ecosystem programs, strategic content, or other inbound-demand initiatives from scratch
- Technical or research experience beyond the level required to sell or manage partnerships

## Benefits

- 401(k) and full health insurance
- Breakfast, lunch, and dinner covered, plus your choice of snacks
- Ubers covered home

*all roles at Sieve require you to be onsite in San Francisco 5 days per week

## About Sieve

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Sieve is an AI research lab and platform focused on building high-quality multimodal data (video, audio, image, and interaction data) and infrastructure for training frontier AI models.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed-stage)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2022
- **Founders**: Mokshith Voodarla (CEO) and Abhinav "Abhi" Ayalur (CTO)

## Core Business
- Primary industry: Artificial Intelligence / Data Infrastructure / Computer Vision
- Target customers: Frontier AI labs, Fortune 100 companies, and fast-growing AI startups working on generative media, robotics, computer use, world models, and agentic systems (primarily B2B Enterprise).
- Mission statement: To build the data and environments that frontier AI labs use to train the next generation of multimodal systems.

## Products & Services
- **Sieve Platform (sievedata.com)**: A development platform to discover, design, and run AI features at scale. It offers pre-built, production-ready apps and models (e.g., `sieve/speech_transcriber` for transcription, `sieve/seamless_text2text` for translation) that can be used via a single API call. The platform provides no-code interfaces, reliable infrastructure, and primitives like queues and async jobs. It is focused on making it easy to combine multiple AI models into complex applications (e.g., video dubbing, translation). [docs.sievedata.com]
- **Sieve Data Lab (sieve.ai)**: A multimodal data lab offering high-quality video, audio, image, and interaction datasets for frontier AI. Services include custom data collection, indexing billions of data points, filtering for semantics and rights, adding dense annotations (transcripts, object labels, UI events), and secure delivery with end-to-end encryption and SOC 2 Type 2 compliance. [sieve.ai]
- **Video AI API (Beta)**: A recently launched API that allows developers to use Sieve's pre-built AI apps and models for video processing in a single call. [sievedata.com]

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Key Metric**: Raised approximately **$4M** in a seed round in 2022. [ycombinator.com, sievedata.com]
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Y Combinator (Winter 2022 batch, with Diana Hu as Primary Partner), AI Grant (Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross). [ycombinator.com, sieve.ai/about]
- **Growth Signals**: The company has evolved from a general AI platform to a specialized research lab focusing on the critical bottleneck of training data for multimodal AI. It has attracted the trust of "frontier AI labs, Fortune 100 companies, and fast-growing AI startups." The team size is listed as 18 on Y Combinator (2022) and they are actively hiring for multiple engineering roles through the end of 2026, indicating scaling. [ycombinator.com, jobs.ashbyhq.com]

## Competitive Advantages
- **Focus on Data as a Moat**: Sieve is explicitly structured as a "research lab exclusively focused on video data," identifying that high-quality training data is the primary bottleneck for the next generation of AI (video, audio, robotics, agentic systems). [ycombinator.com]
- **End-to-End Data Service**: They provide a complete pipeline from custom collection and indexing to dense annotation and secure delivery, unlike many competitors who only offer one piece.
- **Deep Research Partnerships**: The team works directly with leading AI researchers to understand model bottlenecks and design high-signal datasets, creating a tight feedback loop between research needs and data production.
- **Strong Founder-Market Fit**: Founders Mokshith Voodarla (Scale AI, NVIDIA) and Abhinav Ayalur (NVIDIA, Niantic) have direct experience in building computer-vision systems and experiencing the data difficulties first-hand.

## Strategic Focus
- **Deliver Training Data for Frontier AI**: Sieve’s current priority is to scale its exabyte-scale infrastructure and novel multimodal understanding techniques to create datasets for video, audio, images, software, robotics, and interactive worlds. [sieve.ai/about]
- **Enable Complex AI Use Cases**: The platform side focuses on making it easy for developers to combine multiple models to build production-ready AI features (like translation, dubbing) quickly.
- **Data Security and Compliance**: Emphasizing secure, compliant data delivery with SOC 2 controls is a key priority for servicing Fortune 100 companies.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: The company describes itself as "tight-knit, fast-moving, and deeply customer-oriented." It is a "research lab to the core," combining frontier research with infrastructure and customer partnership. [sieve.ai/about]
- **Team**: The team brings together experience from NVIDIA, Scale AI, Zoox, and Niantic, providing exposure to top-tier expertise in AI and infrastructure. [sieve.ai/about]
- **Impact**: Employees will be working on the critical layer of data for the next generation of AI models (generative media, robotics, agents), offering a rare position at the forefront of AI research. [ycombinator.com]
- **Remote/Hybrid/Office**: The company is based in San Francisco, CA.
- **Open Roles**: As of mid-2026, they are actively hiring for **Applied Research Engineer**, **Distributed Systems Engineer**, **Product Engineer**, and **Software Engineer**, with salary ranges listed as $150K - $300K depending on role and experience. [jobs.ashbyhq.com, ycombinator.com]

## Sources
1. [docs.sievedata.com](https://docs.sievedata.com/guide/intro)
2. [jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sieve)
3. [sieve.ai](https://www.sieve.ai/)
4. [sieve.ai/about](https://www.sieve.ai/about)
5. [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/sieve)

## Other roles at Sieve

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