Commercial Director

The Opportunity at Altana (via Safeguard)

As Commercial Director - International Government (Australia), you will own and have primary responsibility for the sale, delivery and expansion of Altana’s deployments with the Australian government, help to cement and grow Altana’s Australian business more generally and ultimately ensure Altana’s commercial success in the region. You will leverage and build relationships with and within large government departments and global bodies to deliver the Atlas to help these organisations see across borders and deep into their supply chains, and build resiliency and manage risk within those supply chains.

You will be a leader within the International Government team, reporting directly to the VP of International Government, and part of Altana’s Commercial Organization more broadly. You will work with some of the top technical and domain experts in trade, law enforcement, and international affairs as thought partners and strategic advisors, leveraging our eminent advisory board and investor base for access to senior government officials and C-Suite executives across the world’s largest and most important organisations.

Primary Responsibilities

As Commercial Director, you will be responsible for managing enterprise-scale customer deployments primarily across our government and, as required, enterprise market engagements in Australia. You will implement, track and stabilise projects, work with users to understand and scope use cases and areas of opportunity, remove roadblocks, anticipate stakeholders needs and support our customers’ critical missions to ensure the success of Altana’s engagements in Australia.

This position requires an experienced leader with a proven track record of project and team management, business development, customer relationship management and organisational and execution skills. You will be comfortable engaging with both technical users of the Altana Atlas and with senior stakeholders within customer organisations and will be responsible for closing six and seven-figure subscription sales of the Altana Atlas to central government and public body buyers.

You Will

• Own business development and go-to-market efforts for government customer engagements in Australia
• Play a foundational role in building Altana’s team and presence on the ground in Australia.
• Partner with other members of the International Government team and Commercial Organisation, implementation engineers, solutions and product teams, to understand customer needs, drive the implementation and create user value. This will often involve working on site with customers, as required and depending on the needs of the team, as well as some in-person time with the team in the UK and/or the US.
• Synthesise concrete goals from customer needs and our product roadmap, distilling your engagement’s strategy down to granular team tasks and issues.
• Manage executive, commercial and technical stakeholders to triage requests from customers to focus the team, while escalating items that need immediate attention.
• Maintain broad awareness of everything involving or related to your team, our International Government customers and product development to maximise our customer delivery and pre-empt and resolve any issues that may steer projects off-course.
• Optimise cross-team collaboration. Align our team and our customers’ teams around shared objectives. Take ownership of the relationship, and initiate improvements, where needed, to maximise efficiency

You Have

• 5-10+ years of experience in sales and business development (ideally with experience selling enterprise software to governments) with demonstrated success managing complex projects in high-stakes environments.
• Proven ability to build positive relationships and influence; particularly within government organisations.
• Excellent problem-solving skills, sound judgement, and composure in high-pressure situations.
• An ability to develop and cultivate strong rapport within our product development teams. You like to engage in technical discussion or can invest in learning technical concepts.
• Experience at an enterprise software company or startup is desirable, but not required.
• This will be based in Canberra and less frequently to Singapore and other locations in the APAC region.

This role will be supporting Australian government customers and requires clearance for access to classified data or systems. Applicants must currently hold security clearance for access to classified information.

Please note that the employment contract for this role will run through safeguard as we build out our Australia presence

Altana Technologies focuses on Machine Learning. Their company has offices in New York City. They have a small team that's between 11-50 employees. To date, Altana Technologies has raised $100M of funding; their latest round was closed on October 2022.

You can view their website at or find them on Twitter and LinkedIn .