Founding Business Development Manager

About Flagright:

Flagright is an AI operating system for financial crime compliance used globally by Fortune 500 companies, large banks, fintechs, and fast growing startups. Flagright enables real-time risk detection, automated investigations, and intelligent decisioning, helping compliance teams operate at their full potential in the fight against financial crime.

We operate as a lean, high-performance team with high individual ownership and direct access to leadership.

The Role

This is a founding leadership role. You'll take ownership of our global business development function, managing a geo-distributed team with a mandate to scale it in the near term. This role requires regular in-office presence to build team knowledge, strengthen collaboration, and support the ongoing development of the BDR team. Being together in person will be key to coaching, knowledge-sharing, onboarding, and creating a strong sales excellence culture.

This is a pure team manager role where you will be responsible for performance management, coaching, talent development, hiring/firing, dispute resolution, process enforcement and success metrics.

People who thrive at Flagright:

• Have been knocked down before and gotten back up

• Are resourceful—they figure things out with whatever tools are available

• Have strong opinions and can defend them

• Are hungry to learn & contribute

• Want to work with no-BS people

People who struggle here:

• Need extensive hand-holding

• View high expectations as “unreasonable”

• Expect strict 9 to 6 boundaries

• Can’t handle ambiguity or rejection

• Prefer consistent routine over fast-changing priorities

• Lead, coach, and develop a distributed team of 4 BDRs across multiple regions, with day-to-day accountability for activity, conversion, and pipeline targets

• Scale the team: own hiring end-to-end, from profile definition and sourcing through interviewing, onboarding, and ramp

• Support the outbound playbook — ICP and account segmentation, multi-channel sequences, messaging by persona and region, and qualification standards

• Design territory and vertical coverage so a global team operates as one coordinated engine, not silos

• Run forecasting and reporting on pipeline generation; present performance and insights directly to founders

• Partner closely with Sales and Marketing to align on handoffs, SLAs, campaign follow-up, and feedback loops from the front line to product and positioning

• Set the bar on culture: instill the habits, standards, and energy of a high-performing outbound team from day one

• 5+ years in business development / sales development in B2B SaaS, including 2+ years managing BDR/SDR teams

• Background at a Start/Scale-up (sub 200 employees)

• Experience managing remote or geo-distributed teams across time zones — you know how to keep distributed people aligned, motivated, and accountable

• A track record of hiring and ramping BDRs quickly; you've grown a team before, ideally in an early-stage or scale-up environment

• Strong command of modern outbound: multi-channel prospecting, sales engagement platforms, CRM (e.g., HubSpot), and data-driven pipeline management

• Builder's mindset — comfortable with ambiguity, first-principles thinking, and shipping process before it's perfect

• Willing and able to sell yourself: you lead from the front and stay close to the conversations

• Excellent written and spoken English; additional languages a plus given the global remit

• Experience selling into regulated industries (e.g., fintech, compliance, FS)

• Prior "founding" or first-manager role at a startup

• Experience opening new geographic markets

What we offer:

• Leadership position with direct influence on Flagright’s global sales strategy

• Report directly to the CEO

• Product with clear, real-world differentiation

• High-bar environment focused on execution, learning, and continuous improvement

• Get equity from day 1 at a Y Combinator startup

• Work alongside a highly competent, top-tier team, including professionals from Y Combinator, ex AWS, and Palantir

• Enjoy a low-bureaucracy environment, minimal meetings, and an asynchronous communications culture