Sales Development Representative

Avante Sales Development Representative

Ask any employee to explain their benefits, and you'll likely get a confused shrug. Ask any HR leader if their benefits investment is working, and you'll get an honest "I don't know." For employees, benefits are confusing and overwhelming. For HR and finance leaders, benefits are the second-largest expense, but they lack the visibility to know what's working and what's wasted.

At Avante, we're changing that. We're an AI-native benefits intelligence platform built to turn benefits complexity into clarity. For employees, our agent Carly provides personalized, always-on benefits guidance. For benefits leaders, our agent Ava monitors their entire program, surfaces what needs attention, and delivers strategic intelligence on costs, utilization, and outcomes in seconds. Together, these agents create a closed-loop system where employee engagement data informs benefits strategy, and smarter strategy improves the employee experience.

We're based in Seattle and New York and work 4 days a week in the office (one day remote). We're growing fast, serving enterprise customers like Goldman Sachs, Samsung, Zscaler, and News Corp, and we're hiring a Sales Development Representative to build the top of our enterprise pipeline. This is an early seat on the sales team, reporting directly to the CRO, with room to grow as we scale.

The Role

We're looking for an experienced Sales Development Representative to own how Avante creates pipeline. You'll be the first conversation a prospect has with us, and you'll set the tone for everything that follows. The benefits leaders we sell to (CHROs, VPs of Total Rewards, benefits directors at Fortune 1000 companies) are busy, skeptical of AI hype, and flooded with point-solution pitches. Your job is to cut through that with a sharp point of view about a problem they feel every day.

This role runs all three motions. You'll run cold outbound into enterprise HR and benefits leaders, qualify and convert inbound demand generated by marketing, and work leads sourced through our channel partners. You'll need to understand the difference between these motions and adjust your approach accordingly. A partner-sourced warm intro is not the same conversation as a cold sequence into a CHRO who's never heard of us.

Because you'll report directly to the CRO, you'll have unusual visibility into how the whole go-to-market machine works, and unusual influence over how the SDR function gets built. The playbooks, sequences, and qualification frameworks aren't fully written yet. You'll help write them. The right person treats that as the best part of the job, not the scary part.

This is a fit for someone 23 years into a sales development career and may have also done full life cycle sales who has carried a pipeline quota, knows how to research an account and write outreach that gets replies, and is ready to operate at a pace where weeks feel like months.

What You'll Do

Build an enterprise pipeline across three motions. Run cold outbound into Fortune 1000 HR and benefits leaders, qualify inbound demand from marketing, and convert warm introductions from our channel partners. Own your number and the activity that gets you there.

Research accounts like an analyst, not a list-puller. Before you reach out, understand the company's benefits ecosystem, recent moves, and likely pain. Avante sells into a complex domain. Generic outreach gets ignored. Specific, informed outreach gets meetings.

Write outreach that earns a reply. Craft sequences and one-off messages that sound like a person who understands benefits, not a templated blast. You'll test angles, subject lines, and channels, and double down on what works.

Qualify hard and hand off clean. Run discovery that separates real opportunities from noise, then deliver AEs a qualified meeting with full context so the next conversation starts strong. Close the loop every time.

Use AI as a core part of how you work. We expect our SDRs to use AI tools daily to research accounts, draft and personalize outreach, summarize calls, and build their own workflows. We're an AI company. The person in this seat should be visibly better at their job because of how they use AI, not just curious about it.

Partner with channel and marketing. Coordinate with our channel partners on co-selling motions and with marketing on inbound follow-up and campaign feedback. Bring the signal from your conversations back to both teams so we get sharper over time.

Learn the product and the domain deeply. Be able to explain what Carly and Ava do together as one platform, why benefits intelligence is a different category from ben admin or care navigation, and what actually lands with a benefits leader. Ask the questions you think are too basic. In this domain, a wrong assumption can cost a deal.

Help build the SDR playbook. Sequences, qualification criteria, target account lists, and process are still being shaped. Document what works, share it, and help turn your individual wins into a repeatable system the next hires can run.

Adapt as we grow. This function will evolve quickly. Your scope, targets, and the way you work will change as the team scales, and you should welcome that.

What We're Looking For

• 23 years of sales development experience (SDR/BDR), ideally selling B2B SaaS into enterprise or mid-market
• A track record of consistently hitting or beating pipeline and meeting targets
• Strong account research and written outreach skills, with examples of messaging that drove replies and meetings
• Hands-on use of AI tools in your day-to-day selling, not just familiarity with the category
• Comfort running outbound, inbound, and partner-sourced motions, and the judgment to tailor your approach to each
• The ability to create structure where little exists and operate without a fully built playbook
• Clear, direct communication and genuine curiosity about the people and problems you're selling into

Nice to Have

• Experience selling into HR, benefits, total rewards, or healthcare buyers
• Experience with a channel or partner-sourced motion
• Familiarity with enterprise sales cycles and multi-stakeholder buying committees
• Early-stage startup experience, especially as an early sales hire

Our Values

Our four values aren't aspirational. They translate into concrete operating tenets that shape how we make decisions every day.

Beat Yesterday. We re-evaluate our own toolkit every quarter, because the sequences and tactics that worked three months ago may already be stale. We act on 70% of the information rather than waiting for certainty, then adjust. We timebox, execute, and iterate, getting outreach in front of real prospects quickly instead of polishing in isolation. And we own our output regardless of how we produced it. AI can get you 80% of the way to a great message. Everything that goes out with your name on it is yours to review, refine, and stand behind.

Embrace Type 2 Fun. Building pipeline from scratch is hard, and we find meaning in the work anyway. We assume good intent and follow up directly rather than venting in side channels. We celebrate wins loudly and specifically, naming the actual behavior so the whole team learns what great looks like. We are on by default, because a prospect who replies at 6:30pm or a partner who needs something over the weekend can't wait until Monday. And we do unscalable things today that build scalable advantages tomorrow: every hand-researched account and personally crafted sequence is an investment in a playbook that compounds.

Stay Hungry, Stay Curious. We expect everyone to be the expert on AI in their function before anyone asks them to be, and for an SDR at an AI company, that bar is high. When you find an outreach angle or workflow that works, teach it. Learn enough about the product, the AEs' world, and the benefits domain to ask good questions. Ask the question you think is too basic, because assumptions about a prospect's benefits committee or buying process are dangerous. And remember: curiosity without urgency is a hobby. Learning has to translate into pipeline on a timeline that matches the opportunity.

Act Like an Owner. We say the uncomfortable thing early, raising a missed number or a process gap directly and within 48 hours. We surface problems when they're small, not the week they become a crisis. Customer-facing work gets priority, always: a prospect or partner gets same-day acknowledgment even if the full answer takes longer. And we close the loop every time, because no one at Avante should ever have to ask "did you see my message?" twice.

What We