Commercial and Business Development (Founding Team)

About the role

This founding role will own Riven's revenue and go-to-market, including prioritizing markets, architecting our earliest enterprise deals, building the models that prove each deal's economics, and converting pilots into scaled, multi-site deployments. You will work as a core strategic partner to the CEO and a credible face for Riven with boards, investors, and the C-suites of the world's largest miners. You will be pushed to understand and execute across many domains simultaneously as we rewrite industrial chemistry.

Riven is hiring a lean, interdisciplinary team and experience spanning multiple roles is welcome. Apply to whichever role is closest to your skillset.

Initial Responsibilities

• Own commercial strategy and revenue: target segments, market-entry sequencing, and pricing and packaging aligned to the economics of a hardware-enabled platform.
• Inform product iteration and actively shape the product roadmap at a pre-seed company.
• Architect enterprise partnerships spanning service, infrastructure, and technology.
• Develop commercial models that support decision-making, including unit economics, ROI frameworks, and scaling scenarios.
• Partner directly with the CEO on market prioritization, deal strategy, board discussions, fundraising narratives, and investor engagement.
• Support the build and scale of both the commercial organization and Riven more broadly, including contributing to operating norms and firmwide institutional best practices.

Qualifications

• 8+ years experience commercializing hardware-enabled, infrastructure-based, or operationally complex platforms, including phased deployment from pilot through scaled, multi-site rollout.
• Deep mining and critical-minerals credibility, with a live network from the majors through junior miners and the ability to engage with senior leaders at those organizations.
• A track record taking technical early-stage products to market, including building go-to-market motions where none existed before.
• Capital-formation fluency, including comfort carrying a fundraising narrative and holding cap-table, financing, and shareholder conversations.
• Hands-on model ownership, including building and defending unit economics and deal models in Excel rather than delegating them.
• Working understanding of hydrometallurgy and solvent extraction, or comparable process-industry fluency.
• Clear interdisciplinary communication and the curiosity to quickly learn and execute in new domains.
• Ability to prioritize, execute, and collaborate with a high degree of agency, a willingness to be wrong, and the ambition to build something that has never existed before.
• Trust, humor, rigor, and an excitement to work in a scrappy, interdisciplinary early-stage environment.

Bonus Points

• Experience opening new markets or geographies.
• Early-stage or startup experience, and building rather than inheriting a commercial function.
• Fluency with government and non-dilutive capital (grants, public programs), and comfort folding a light government-relations scope into the commercial mandate rather than needing a dedicated hire.