Business Development Associate

About The Role

You sit at the centre of Samba's commercial partnerships function, supporting the origination,
evaluation, negotiation, and ongoing management of complex partnerships — initially across
EMEA, with scope to grow into deals beyond it — through which Samba's data, products, and
capabilities are monetised with third-party platforms and technologies. Working closely with
senior leadership on Samba's most commercially significant deals, you build real expertise in
deal structuring, commercial negotiation, partner economics, and data licensing. You likely
bring 2+ years in investment banking, private equity, M&A, corporate development, or
consulting — a background that builds the analytical discipline these deals require and prepares
you for the uncomfortable stages of a negotiation: conflicting incentives, incomplete
information, and difficult counterparties. That means transaction-grade analytical discipline
applied to commercial partnerships — how to structure a partnership, evaluate a licensing
arrangement, value the capabilities each party contributes, and reach a defensible view on
whether a partnership is worth pursuing at all — along with fluency in financial modelling and a
real interest in the media and technology sectors. Samba is an AI-first company — the AI and
agentic ecosystem is central to our next wave of monetisation, and you help shape the
commercial models that capture it.

What You'll Do:

• Source & Structure Partnerships: Support the origination, evaluation, structuring, and
  execution of partnerships across the media, technology, and data analytics sectors, initially
  with an EMEA focus — working closely with senior leadership on deals with platforms
  (DSPs, SSPs, ad servers, CDPs, and data marketplaces), OEMs, advertisers, publishers, and
  data partners.
• Design Commercial Models: Prepare business cases to evaluate business development
  opportunities and design the commercial model appropriate to each engagement — fixed
  or minimum-guaranteed fees, usage- or performance-based structures, value-exchange
  arrangements in which each party contributes capability rather than cash, or a hybrid of
  these — modelling the multi-year economics of each option; the most effective structure is
  often not the most obvious one, so creativity and lateral thinking matter here.
• Monetise the AI Ecosystem: Identify and evaluate opportunities to monetise Samba's data
  and capabilities within the AI and agentic ecosystem — AI platforms, model developers, and
  agent-based products — and support the development of commercial models for those
  opportunities.
• Build Deal Materials: Create partner-facing decks, term sheets, and deal summaries for
  strategic discussions with prospective and existing partners.
• Run Diligence & Benchmarking: Conduct commercial and financial diligence on prospective
  partners — reviewing financial statements, key performance metrics, product maturity, and
  business models — to assess partner viability, the value of the capability each partner
  brings, and whether the combined economics justify a partnership, and maintain
  competitive benchmarking of comparable partner and vendor terms in market so that
  terms offered to Samba are tested against alternatives rather than accepted at face value.
• Negotiate & Coordinate: Support the negotiation of partnership terms across scope of
  licence and intellectual property (IP) ownership, usage rights and permitted-use
  restrictions, pricing and commercial structure, service levels and performance remedies,
  and liability, termination, and exit — coordinating with finance, legal, privacy, product, and
  engineering teams to support deal execution and partnership implementation while
  protecting Samba's commercial and compliance position.
• Know the Market: Conduct industry research and competitive analysis to identify emerging
  trends, potential partners, and strategic opportunities across the streaming, advertising
  technology, and AI landscape, and develop and maintain relationships with existing and
  prospective partners — attending industry conferences and networking events to surface
  opportunities and maintain market awareness.
• Work AI-First: Apply AI and agentic tooling to your own workflow — research, diligence,
  modelling, drafting, and pipeline management — to improve both the speed and quality of
  your output, and maintain partnership pipeline tracking and status reporting for ongoing
  business development activities.

What You Bring

• 2+ years of experience in investment banking, private equity, M&A, corporate
  development, management consulting, or a commercial role in media, advertising
  technology, or data — you have worked on complex deals, you understand how they come
  together, and you are able to work through the difficult and uncomfortable stages of a
  negotiation.
• Strong analytical foundations — proficiency in Excel and the ability to build and maintain
  models assessing deal economics, valuation, and returns — paired with the creativity to
  think laterally about commercial structure and the confidence to propose an
  unconventional model and explain why it is the right one.
• Comfort with AI and experience using it in your own role to improve performance and
  outcomes — Samba is an AI-first company and looks for that instinct in every hire; you can
  get up to speed quickly on how AI and agentic tooling are changing the media, advertising,
  and data landscape and where the commercial opportunities sit for a company holding data
  assets like Samba's. Experience in this sector is not required, but the ability to learn it
  quickly is.
• Demonstrated ability to synthesise complex financial and business information and
  communicate findings clearly and concisely to senior leadership, with excellent written and
  verbal communication skills and experience creating executive-level presentations.
• Comfort working with contracts and commercial terms — able to read a term sheet or
  master services agreement (MSA) and identify what is missing, what is one-sided, and what
  would constrain Samba commercially in future, even if you are not the lawyer in the room
  — and treating privacy and data compliance as a design consideration rather than a box to
  tick, with awareness of the regulatory and industry frameworks governing the use of
  consumer data in advertising and measurement.
• Curious and quick to learn — you want to understand Samba's products deeply and stay
  close to what's happening in the TV, streaming, programmatic, and AI landscape.
• Highly organised and detail-oriented — a self-starter who works independently with
  minimal supervision, contributes positively to the culture as a team player, manages
  multiple workstreams simultaneously in a fast-paced environment, and is willing to travel as
  needed for partner meetings and deal execution.
• Bachelor's degree in Finance, Economics, or Business, or equivalent practical experience.