Business Development Associate

About the role

This is a BD Associate role on the Heroes team, our group focuses on the most loved restaurant brands in the country, the ones with 1 to 20 locations, obsessive customer followings, and real expansion potential.

As a BD Associate, you get to own a market: finding the right operators, building the relationship, running the pitch, and helping to get the deal signed. That means real ownership and real accountability from day one. Your pipeline is your business, and what you build and close shows up directly in Atoms' growth.

What you'll do

Prospecting & Pipeline Generation

• Research, identify, and engage the most loved restaurant brands in the country, mid-market operators with 1-20 locations who've outgrown a single kitchen but aren't enterprise scale.
• Build a personalized outbound strategy across phone, email, LinkedIn, and in person, including hosting and attending industry events, dinners, and meetups where these operators actually spend their time.
• Own your pipeline end to end. You source it, qualify it, pitch it, and support close.
• Build and maintain a healthy pipeline against clear outreach and revenue targets.

Strategic Account Research & Analysis

• Conduct in-depth research on restaurant brands: leadership, unit economics, expansion plans, and competitive position.
• Partner with our Strategy and Analytics teams to turn raw data (delivery volumes, whitespace, ROIC) into a compelling, story-driven case for why CloudKitchens, Otter, or Picnic is the right next move for an operator.
• Monitor industry and competitive trends to sharpen outbound strategy and surface new opportunities.
• Bring market insights and operator feedback back to the team to help shape BD strategy.

Sales Strategy & Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Allocate budget for your respective market and own market strategy
• Support territory planning and account prioritization for your market.

Pipeline Performance & Operational Excellence

• Look for ways to make your own workflow faster and smarter, including using AI to speed up research, outreach, and reporting.
• Bring a builder's mindset: test, measure, and improve how you prospect.

Executive Communication & Relationship Building

• Build genuine relationships with restaurant founders and operators. This is a business built on trust, not just a pipeline of accounts.
• Represent Atoms, and the full CloudKitchens, Otter, and Picnic story, with professionalism and precision.
• Communicate pipeline updates, market insights, and competitive intelligence clearly to sales leadership.

What we’re looking for

• 1-4 years of experience in Business Development, Investment Banking, Go-to-Market, Consulting, Strategy, or Operations . Client-facing experience helps, but we care more about whether you're smart, analytical, charismatic, and genuinely curious about BD and the restaurant industry than about your exact title history.
• A track record of generating outbound pipelines, ideally in mid-market or small/independent-business accounts. This is a different motion than enterprise procurement cycles.
• Strong research and analytical instincts, with the ability to turn data into a story that lands with a founder or operator.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, comfortable moving between a founder's kitchen and a boardroom.
• A high sense of ownership. You want a role where the outcome is on you, not a role with a lot of guardrails.
• Comfortable in a fast-paced, high-accountability environment where priorities shift.
• Bonus: familiarity with Salesforce or similar sales tools is nice to have, not required. We'd rather hire for judgment and hustle than tool familiarity, you'll pick the tools up fast.

What else you need to know

This role is based in our New York office. Atoms is a company driven by invention and continuous change - we are constantly reimagining our industries, building new products, and refining how we operate. We do our best work together. That’s why all of our office-based teams work onsite, five days a week.

The base salary range for this role is $80,000 - $100,000 per year.

Add’l Incentive Compensation: Individuals can earn an estimated annual incentive compensation range of $30,000 - $50,000 when meeting performance expectations. Actual incentive compensation varies based on individual sales performance and targets.

Base salary is just one part of your total rewards package. You may also be eligible for equity awards and an annual performance-based bonus.

Benefits Summary (USA Full-Time Exempt Employees):

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance (multiple plans, incl. HSA options).
• Company-paid life and disability insurance (short- and long-term).
• Voluntary insurance: accident, critical illness, hospital indemnity.
• Optional supplemental life insurance for self, spouse, and children.
• Pet insurance discount.
• 401(k).
• Health Savings Account (HSA)
• Flexible Spending Accounts (Healthcare, Dependent Care, Commuter)
• Time Off policies:
• Discretionary vacation days
• 8 paid holidays per year
• Paid sick time
• Paid Bereavement leave
• Paid Parental Leave

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