Job Title: Commercial Operations & Strategy Lead

Department: Commercial Strategy

Reports To: Head of Commercial Strategy

Employment Type: Full-Time

Location: Houston, TX – Strongly Preferred

Travel: Regular travel to Houston, Korea, and partner/customer sites

Who We Are

Persona AI is building humanoid robots for the most demanding environments in heavy industry — shipyards, steel mills, fabrication facilities, and offshore platforms — performing welding, grinding, maintenance, inspection, and material-handling work that is dangerous, physically demanding, and increasingly difficult to staff.

We are backed by leading strategic and financial investors and engaged with global industrial leaders across Korea, Japan, the United States, and Singapore. Korea is the center of gravity for our early commercial strategy, anchored by relationships with the world’s leading shipbuilders and steelmakers. Our work spans both the robot platform itself and the systems, partners, and playbooks required to deploy it at scale.

Why Join Persona AI?

• We offer competitive compensation, a performance-based bonus, 99% employer covered medical benefits, early-stage equity, competitive PTO, and a company-wide paid winter break between December 24th and January 2nd.

• You’ll shape technology that’s redefining the possibilities of robotics and human interaction.

• Work alongside passionate teammates who value creativity, and continuous learning.

• Enjoy full access to advanced tools, systems, and the freedom to build scalable PO programs.

About the Role

We are looking for a Commercial Operations & Strategy Lead to be the right hand to our Head of Commercial Strategy and a force multiplier across Persona’s entire go-to-market motion. This is a high-ownership, high-trust role for an operator who thrives in ambiguity, builds structure where none exists, and moves complex, multi-party commercial relationships toward closed contracts.

This role is deliberately designed to grow. It begins as an execution-and-operations partner — driving the details that turn conversations into signed agreements and building the operating backbone of our commercial function. As Persona scales, this role will also support coordination of the broader commercial team. We are looking for someone who is energized by earning that scope through impact rather than receiving it by title on day one.

The immediate priority is concrete: help us convert our anchor Korean relationships — including HD Hyundai and POSCO — into binding commercial contracts, while standing up the pipeline, process, and partner-management infrastructure that makes the next ten engagements repeatable. Native Korean fluency and the cultural fluency to operate inside Korean industrial organizations are core to this mission.

What You Will Be Doing

Commercial Execution & Deal Advancement

• Drive contracts to close by owning the execution layer beneath active commercial negotiations, which includes tracking open items, coordinating legal review, managing document flow, and ensuring both counterparties and internal stakeholders move toward signature within agreed timelines.

• Build the source of truth by establishing clear account maps for key relationships, identifying decision-makers, understanding timelines and budget authority, and clarifying the status of each opportunity, replacing fragmented, single-threaded visibility with a reliable, shared perspective.

• Multi-thread key relationships by broad

Korea & Partner Ecosystem

• Anchor the Korea engagements, serving as a trusted operator across HD Hyundai, POSCO, and other Korean relationships by managing cadence, preparation, follow-through, and conducting substantive business dialogue natively in Korean.

• Manage intermediaries and integrators by coordinating third parties such as integration partners, vendors of record, translators, and advisors to ensure their work aligns with Persona’s commercial objectives and timelines.

• Navigate the systems problem by helping to position Persona and its partners around the real deployment challenge—the integration and systems work surrounding the robot—rather than focusing solely on hardware and software.

Go-to-Market Operations & Process

• Own pipeline operations: Build and maintain pipeline hygiene, qualification discipline, and the operational cadence behind the go-to-market motion so opportunities are scored, prioritized, and progressed consistently.

• Operationalize the engagement model: Turn Persona’s structured commercial engagement approach from a model on paper into a running, repeatable machine — templates, tracking, and reporting that scale without over-engineering at this stage.

• Build internal infrastructure: Create the dashboards, baseline metrics, and lightweight systems that give leadership real-time visibility into commercial health, and stay current and reachable to unblock problems regardless of where you are physically located.

Growing Commercial Operations

• Amplify the Head of Commercial Strategy by preparing meetings, capturing and driving decisions, and owning cross-functional follow-through so high-value commitments don’t fall through the cracks.

• Grow into a broader scope by taking ownership of workstreams end to end as the team builds — across and beyond Korea — and help shape the commercial organization as it scales toward a broader team coordination and support mandate.

What We Are Looking For:

• Native or fully fluent Korean and English, with demonstrated experience conducting substantive business and deal dialogue in Korean.

• Deep familiarity with the norms of trust, hierarchy, and decision-making inside Korean corporate and industrial organizations.

• 10+ years in roles demanding end-to-end ownership of complex, high-stakes processes — e.g. sales, transactions, corporate development, or operating roles in fast-moving companies.

• A track record of bringing structure to ambiguity: building infrastructure, processes, or organizations from scratch rather than inheriting them.

• Comfort with a surge-and-maintenance travel rhythm across time zones, and the operating discipline to stay current and unblock work remotely.

• Strong commercial and analytical instincts — fluency with contracts, negotiation dynamics, and the numbers behind a deal.

Bonus Skills:

• Genuine technical fluency or a technical background sufficient to engage credibly on a physical-AI/robotics roadmap.

• Exposure to industrial, manufacturing, robotics, or deep-tech environments, or demonstrated initiative to build expertise in them.

• Experience managing outside advisors, integrators

Persona AI is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.