Commercial Operations & Strategy Lead

About the role

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.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

Requirements

• 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.
• 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.

Qualifications

• 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.