What are the responsibilities and job description for the Business Development Manager position at Espresso Clinical?
Business Development Manager — Founding Commercial Hire
Espresso Clinical · Boston / US East Coast · First commercial hire · Backed by Team8
Espresso is a clinical-trial-oversight startup. Our product, R1, tells a pharmaceutical company within about a day when a trial has crossed a line, instead of the ~46 days it takes them today. We have a product, real pilot results and a CEO who closes deals. What we do not have is anyone filling the top of the funnel. That is this job.
You would be our first commercial hire. Your job is to open doors at pharma sponsors and CROs: work out who inside a industry actually owns this problem, reach them until they answer, qualify them properly, and put real first meetings on the CEO's calendar. He takes the meeting and closes it. You make sure there is always a next one, and that he walks in briefed.
This is a hands-on individual-contributor seat. You are not managing anyone and you are not owning marketing. You are the person who gets Espresso into rooms it has no business being in yet.
What you would own
- Account strategy. Decide which accounts are worth the effort and who inside them matters — the Clinical Operations and Quality side, and the R&D Data and AI side. Multi-thread the ones that count.
- Outreach that earns a reply. Email, LinkedIn, phone, conference follow-up. Written outreach is most of this job and it has to survive a VP's inbox.
- Qualification. Not just booking meetings — establishing there is a real problem, a real study, and a real reason to talk. We define the bar together and that bar is your number.
- Judgment we act on. You are closest to the market. When the message is not landing, you are the one who tells us why and what to change.
What we give you
You are not inventing the go-to-market from scratch. We provide the ICP, the positioning, the proof points, the deck and one-pagers, the tooling and data budget, and a CEO who will sit on calls with you and work the messaging with you. Your job is to run the motion inside that, and to tell us where it breaks.
What we are looking for
- 5 years generating your own pipeline in enterprise or complex B2B sales. You have personally sourced meetings and opportunities — not waited for marketing or an SDR to hand them over.
- Experience selling into large, slow, multi-stakeholder organizations, where the buying committee has six people and the cycle is measured in quarters.
- You have prospected for a company nobody had heard of. You know what it takes to earn attention with no brand behind you.
- A clear, credible writer. If you cannot write a five-line email that a VP of Clinical Operations answers, this will not work.
- Comfortable in a technical, regulated industry and quick to learn the vocabulary. Exposure to pharma, biotech, clinical trials or life-sciences software is a real plus, not a requirement.
- US-based, East Coast. Comfortable being the only commercial person in the building.
Compensation
Competitive base plus performance-based variable tied to what you actually control, with meaningful equity in the first commercial seat. We benchmark against Boston enterprise-software market rates and we are flexible for the right person — the package is built around experience rather than slotted into a band.
We would rather talk about it properly on the first call than negotiate through a job post.
How to apply
Send a note to Yoran Bar directly at yoran@espressoclinical.com. Tell us about a pipeline you built from scratch — what you tried, what flopped, and what finally worked. Show numbers. We would rather read that than a cover letter.
Espresso Clinical is an equal opportunity employer.