Director of Corporate Development & Special Projects, VAST Data
AI operating system
Be an early applicant
AI operating system
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
1001+ employees
Company mission
To empower intelligent agents to store, think, communicate, and act.
Role
Who you are
- The ideal candidate brings a builder’s mindset, exceptional business judgment, and a proven track record in strategic deal execution within the high-growth tech ecosystem
- Bachelor’s degree in quantitative field. MBA preferred though not required
- 8+ years of experience in Corporate Development, Investment Banking, or VC/PE, with a significant focus on tech M&A and strategic growth
- Exceptional modeling skills, and experience with complex businesses in high growth, highly dynamic markets. Adept with relevant tools including AI tools, Excel and Google Workspace. Tableau, SFDC and NetSuite familiarity a plus
- Outstanding communications skills, with experience preparing, presenting and communicating with executives, investors and sophisticated business audiences. Strong ‘storytelling with data’ skills are key
- Highly driven with a strong ownership mentality and deep intellectual curiosity. Pragmatic and willing to ‘roll up sleeves’
What the job involves
- We are seeking a proactive and strategic Director of Corporate Development & Special Projects to build and lead a new Corporate Development function at VAST
- You will be responsible for driving VAST’s strategic growth through investments, M&A and special projects
- This role serves as a key partner to the executive team in identifying and executing opportunities that expand our platform and market leadership
- Build and scale VAST’s Corporate Development function from the ground up, establishing processes for deal sourcing and execution
- Proactively source, evaluate, and execute strategic investments and M&A opportunities that align with VAST’s long-term vision
- Conduct deep market research and competitive analysis to inform corporate strategy and analyze opportunities, including developing and maintaining a deep understanding of relevant products, technologies and markets
- Manage the end-to-end deal process, including diligence, financial modeling, negotiation, and integration planning
- Maintain and expand strong relationships with the broader tech ecosystem, including VCs, investment bankers, and potential targets
- Lead and conduct Special Projects, based on the strategic priorities of VAST. These will be defined on an ongoing basis and will typically be projects that are strategic, cross-functional, complex and / or competitively sensitive
- Conduct and maintain financial benchmarking (key metrics, performance and practices vs peers / industry) on an ongoing basis to inform strategy, planning and positioning
- Support Investor Relations activities including narrative crafting, materials development, ongoing investor communications, conference prep and any raise activities
- Develop and maintain close working relationships across the company
Our take
VAST Data is building what you might call the plumbing for the AI era - a purpose-built data platform that unifies storage, compute, and data services in a single, scalable system. With its disaggregated, shared-everything (DASE) architecture, it allows companies to scale their storage independently from compute, meaning AI workloads can grow without being held back by infrastructure bottlenecks. And their platform delivers flash-speed performance, multi-protocol access, and enterprise-grade reliability, all while keeping costs reasonable.
This architecture is especially relevant now, and the company has recently partnered with GMI Cloud as a key data infrastructure provider for GMI's ambitious new "AI factory" in Taiwan. The data centre is expected to house 7,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUS and will lean on VAST's exabyte-scale storage to handle data for model training, inference, and real-time processing.
On top of this, VAST has secured some major partnerships and deals that really position it strongly for the future of AI infrastructure. In November 2025, it struck a $1.17B agreement with CoreWeave, making VAST the primary data foundation for their GPU cloud. It also expanded its collaboration with Google Cloud to offer its AI Operating System as a fully managed service, allowing global data access across on-prem and cloud environments using VAST DataSpace. 2026 saw it complete a $1 billion Series F round that rocketed its valuation to $30 billion. These moves suggest VAST isn't just keeping up with AI demand but shaping the infrastructure that will power the next generation of large-scale, distributed intelligent systems.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
40% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Dec 2023
$118m
SERIES E
May 2021
$83m
SERIES D
Total funding: $381m
Leadership
Renen Hallak
(Co-Founder & CEO)BA and an MSc in Computer Science. Prior to co-founding VAST, they led the architecture and development of an all flash array at XtremIO as VP of R&D.
Shachar Fienblit
(Co-Founder & Chief R&D Officer)BSC in Computer Software Engineering. Prior to co-founding VAST, they were the VP of Engineering at Kaminario before being promoted to CTO.
Jeff Denworth
(Co-Founder)Prior to co-founding VAST, they were the SVP of Marketing at CTERA Networks and DDN Storage.
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