How to Break Into Corporate Development from Banking or PE

Corporate development is the smallest of the operating functions worth targeting and one of the best paid. It is the team that decides what a company buys, what it pays, and whether the thing it bought works afterwards. For someone leaving investment banking or a private equity fund, it is the exit where the least of your skill set gets discarded, and the one where the seats are hardest to find, because there are very few of them and they are concentrated in a handful of cities.

Across the live US operating roles on Buildside today, 62 are corporate development seats, spread across 41 companies. For comparison, strategy and operations accounts for more than four times that. Corp dev is a real path, but it is a narrow one, and the narrowness shapes everything about how you find a seat.

What the job actually is

Corp dev covers four things, and different companies weight them very differently:

• Sourcing. Building and maintaining a view of who is worth buying, usually a live target list with a thesis attached to each name. At companies that acquire regularly this is most of the job.
• Valuation and modelling. The part that looks most like banking. Accretion/dilution, synergy cases, build-versus-buy analysis, a board-ready recommendation.
• Diligence and execution. Running the workstreams, managing bankers and counsel, getting from LOI to signing without surprises.
• Integration. The part banking never taught you, and the part that determines whether the deal was any good. Frequently shared with BizOps or a general manager.

The mix matters more than the title. A corp dev seat at a serial acquirer is a deal seat. A corp dev seat at a company that has bought two things in five years is a strategy seat with occasional deals, and if you take it expecting deal flow you will be bored inside a year. Ask in the interview how many transactions closed in the last eighteen months, and how many the company expects in the next twelve.

What the seats pay

Every figure below is the midpoint of a range the employer posted itself, on live US postings, grouped by the years of experience the posting asks for. They are base and target cash. They exclude equity, which at a growth-stage company is a material part of the package.

Two things stand out. The first is the slope: the jump from the three-to-six band to the ten-plus band is larger in corp dev than in any other operating function we track, because senior corp dev is a job companies pay to get right and the supply of people who have signed and integrated deals at scale is small.

The second is the bottom row. One live corp dev posting asks for one to two years of experience. This is not an entry-level function anywhere. If you are early, the honest route in is a deal seat somewhere else first, or a strategic finance or BizOps seat at a company that acquires, and then a move across.

Who gets hired

The postings are unusually explicit about background, and they cluster:

The single most common failure mode in interviews is describing deals you staffed rather than decisions you made. A corp dev team is hiring the person who says "we should not buy this, and here is the assumption that breaks." Have two examples ready, one where you were right and one where you were overruled.

Where the seats are

Corp dev is the least geographically distributed operating function on the board. Of the 62 live seats, 14 are in San Francisco and 9 in New York. After that it fragments into ones and twos: Austin, Mountain View, Los Angeles, the odd hybrid arrangement. Nineteen name remote or a remote option, which is roughly the same share as chief of staff seats.

The remote seats that exist skew senior, which is worth knowing before you read too much into the pay figures: the remote corp dev median is higher than the onsite one, but that is a seniority effect rather than a remote premium. Companies are comfortable hiring a remote head of corp dev with fifteen years of deals behind them, and much less comfortable hiring a remote analyst.

Because the function is small and concentrated, a target-list search works better here than for any other operating role. Fifty companies that acquire regularly, checked continuously, will surface more relevant seats than a keyword alert on the word "corporate development" — partly because the same job is posted as "Strategy & Corporate Development," "Business Development" (confusingly), "M&A Manager," and "Strategic Partnerships & Acquisitions."

What to do in the next month

If you are in banking or at a fund now, three concrete moves:

1. Build the target list before you need it. Twenty to fifty companies that have closed an acquisition in the last two years and are large enough to have a dedicated team. Their careers pages are where the seats appear first, and a corp dev opening often closes inside three weeks.
2. Write two deal stories the way an operator reads them. Problem, what you personally did, what you concluded, what happened after. No pitch language.
3. Decide honestly whether you want deal flow or a business. If the answer is a business, strategic finance or BizOps will make you happier than corp dev, and the seats are far more numerous. Our breakdown of the three functions sets out what each one actually owns day to day, and the investment banking exit guide covers the wider set of paths from an analyst seat.