Principal Business Development Lead

What if your business development experience could help advance cancer research, model climate impacts, or combat human trafficking, instead of chasing incremental deals or selling pre-packaged solutions?

At Kitware, you won't be selling a fixed product or following someone else's roadmap. You'll work directly with engineers and researchers to identify opportunities, shape what gets built, and turn real-world problems into funded, high-impact technical work. That might mean shaping an AI-driven medical imaging platform, a large-scale scientific data system, or a geospatial analytics capability that doesn’t exist yet.

Kitware advances science and makes the world a better place through open-source software. We collaborate with top universities, national laboratories, government agencies, and commercial technology leaders to develop both cutting-edge research prototypes and production systems with outsized real-world impact. Our tools are used by millions, including CMake, a widely used tool in C++ development.

We're a 100% employee-owned company (ESOP) with no outside investors and about 200 employees. Our leadership has a technical background, and there's no middle management layer between you and the problems you're solving. We're not chasing VC rounds or seeking an exit. We're building software that will matter for decades.

If you're looking to move beyond traditional business development and want a role where you'll influence what gets built, which markets we pursue, and how our Software & Data Solutions portfolio evolves, we'd love to talk.

About the Software & Data Solutions (SDS) Team

Our mission: We connect people with their data through applications and tools that help scientists, analysts, and researchers achieve maximum reach and impact. Our projects range from large-scale data management platforms to custom visualization tools to open-source libraries used across the scientific community. Our team is roughly 40 engineers, and most projects are generally staffed with two to eight people.

Values that guide us

Staff empowerment. We trust people to make decisions, engage customers directly, and take ownership without micromanagement.

Pursuit of passions. We value curiosity and an entrepreneurial mindset. We look for opportunities where our technical strengths, customer needs, and meaningful problems meet.

Solutions over software. We choose technologies based on the problem, not the other way around, and focus on sustainable solutions that make our customers successful.

Focus on the important. We tackle the most pressing and important problems, not just those that are the easiest to solve or most politically palatable. We share the same objectives and we use a free exchange of ideas to find the best solutions.

The work we pursue

There is a lot that we're building at Kitware. Here are some examples that give a sense of the problems we tackle:

• Data management and analysis platforms: Building web applications that help researchers and analysts manage, query, and derive insight from complex and unique datasets across domains like health care, geospatial intelligence, and climate science.

• Domain-specific applications: Building custom applications for collaborators, including national labs, universities, medical device manufacturers, and government agencies, for web and mobile platforms.

• Interactive data visualization: Creating browser-based tools that make large-scale scientific data explorable and understandable, from medical imaging to environmental modeling.

• Open-source libraries and tools: Extending and maintaining Kitware's portfolio of widely used open-source projects, improving their web integrations and developer experience.

What You'll Do

• Build a strong pipeline of government and commercial opportunities aligned with the Software & Data Solutions strategy.

• Develop trusted relationships with government agencies, commercial organizations, research institutions, and strategic partners that lead to new and repeat business.

• Identify and shape opportunities by connecting customer needs with Kitware's technical capabilities and collaborating with engineers and researchers to turn promising ideas into fundable projects.

• Lead proposal efforts from early customer engagement through proposal development, submission, and award.

• Craft compelling proposals by collaborating with Kitware's technical experts to translate customer needs and technical approaches into persuasive, well-written proposals.

• Sustain strategic customer relationships beyond the initial award, partnering with project and technical leads to ensure customer success, identify follow-on opportunities, and grow key accounts.

• Shape and execute team growth strategy by identifying emerging markets, partnership opportunities, and technology areas where Kitware can build impactful and transformative capabilities.

• Represent Kitware at customer meetings, conferences, industry events, and technical workshops.

Who You Are You bridge technical innovation and customer needs. You know how to build trust, originate and shape opportunities, and collaborate with technical teams to turn ideas into funded programs and lasting partnerships.

You bring (required):

• 10+ years of relevant experience, with demonstrated success originating, shaping, and winning complex technical work in both government R&D and commercial markets.

• Experience leading capture from early customer engagement through proposal development and award.

• A record of building and growing strategic customer relationships that generate new and repeat business.

• An established professional network that has created business opportunities or strategic partnerships.

• Ability to understand complex technical concepts, contribute substantive proposal writing, and communicate effectively with engineers, researchers, executives, and customers.

• Bachelor’s degree in business, a STEM field, or a related area, or equivalent professional experience.

• Willingness to work in a Kitware office at least three days per week.

• Due to contractual restrictions, only candidates who are U.S. persons (citizens, permanent residents, asylees, or refugees) will be considered for this position.

You've likely also done some of these (preferred):

• Led business development or capture at a research organization, technology company, or scientific software firm.

• Held a technical leadership, solution-development, or customer-facing engineering role.

• Developed opportunities involving AI/ML, scientific software, data platforms, visualization, medical imaging, geospatial analytics, or high-performance computing.

• Built partnerships with federal R&D agencies, research universities, national laboratories, or commercial technology companies.

• Worked in open-source software or collaborative R&D environments.

You'll thrive here if you:

• Prefer shaping new solutions over selling predefined products.

• Are curious about new technologies, markets, and customer problems - and recognize where Kitware can add value.

• Build lasting relationships and exercise sound judgment about which opportunities to pursue.

• Thrive with autonomy, proactively creating opportunities while collaborating closely with technical teams.

Our Interview Process

• Initial conversation. Talk with HR about your background, interests, and the role.

• Business and solution-shaping discussion. Meet engineering and business leaders to discuss relationship development, opportunity identification, capture, and collaboration with technical teams.

• Full-day interview. Meet team members and leadership, present an opportunity you helped develop and win, and discuss customer relationships, capture strategy, and ways of working.

Why Kitware?

Kitware is a research and development software company working to advance science, make a positive impact, and share our results. Our work contributes to areas including healthcare, national security, and advanced computing, and our customers and collaborators include government organizations, national laboratories, leading universities, medical device manufacturers, technology companies, and other organizations around the world.

We're also 100% employee-owned through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). Eligible employees have the opportunity to share in the value they help create, giving our people a meaningful stake in Kitware's long-term success.

Our employees enjoy a collaborative work environment with flexibility in their assignments, significant independence, and the opportunity to take ownership of their work.

Benefits Include:

• Six weeks of paid time off

• Flexible working hours

• Competitive compensation

• Employee bonus plan

• 401(k)

• Health and life insurance

• Short- and long-term disability insurance

• Tuition reimbursement

• Relocation assistance when applicable

• Free coffee, drinks, and snacks

For more information on our benefit offerings, please visit: https://www.kitware.com/careers/.

Equal Employment Opportunity

Kitware actively subscribes to a policy of equal employment opportunity. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, protected veteran status, uniformed service member status, or any other characteristics protected by applicable law.

If you need assistance with applying or interviewing for a role due to a disability or special need, please reach out directly to our HR team at hr@kitware.com at any time during the hiring process.

Any unsolicited resume sent to Kitware, including to Kitware's mailing addresses, fax machines or email addresses, whether directly to Kitware employees or to Kitware's applicant tracking system, will be considered Kitware property. Kitware will not pay a fee for any placement resulting from the receipt of an unsolicited resume, and will consider any candidate submitted by a recruitment agency without a fully executed contract with Kitware to have been referred free of any charges or fees.