Commercial Lead, Retail Palo Alto

Go-to-Market & Operations · Palo Alto · full-time Own an industry at Sycamore: find the enterprise problems worth solving, earn technical trust with the people who own them, and turn early deployments into durable revenue. About Sycamore Sycamore is building the trusted agent operating system for the enterprise. Our platform helps companies build, deploy, and orchestrate agentic apps that take on real operational work, with the security and control large organizations need. We are a small, engineering-led team working directly with Fortune 500 enterprises. We have raised $65M from Coatue and Lightspeed, along with other investors and industry leaders. The role You will own Sycamore’s commercial results in one industry: finding the right customers, understanding their operations well enough to be useful in a technical conversation, running deals from first meeting through production deployment, and building the account relationships that turn a first workflow into a platform commitment. This is a technical commercial role at an engineering-led company: you will spend as much time with operators and engineers as with executives, and overselling a capability we do not have costs us far more than a slow quarter. Early customers in a new category do not arrive through a mature pipeline, so the work is original: identifying which companies in your industry are ready, finding the executive who owns the problem and the operator who feels it, and constructing a first engagement narrow enough to succeed and consequential enough to matter. Retail runs a high volume of repetitive operational decisions under thin margins and hard seasonal deadlines: assortment and pricing changes, supplier and purchase-order management, catalog and product-data quality, promotion setup, store and field operations, returns and claims, and customer-service escalation. The work is distributed across merchandising, supply chain, store operations, and care teams that rarely share a system of record. Retail also moves faster than most enterprise segments. Buyers will run a pilot in weeks rather than quarters, and they will judge it on peak-season readiness and hard operating metrics. That rewards a seller who can scope a first deployment tightly and prove value before the next planning cycle closes. What you will do Own pipeline, forecast, and revenue for your industry, from first contact through production deployment, adoption, and expansion. Run technical discovery alongside our engineers, reducing a broad AI ambition to a specific workflow with real users, permissions, risks, and measurable outcomes. Navigate enterprise buying: security review, procurement, legal, data protection, and the internal approvals that decide whether a pilot becomes a contract. Stay accountable after signature for adoption, measured value, executive communication, and renewal or expansion. Build the references, repeatable deployment patterns, and segment knowledge that make the next deal in your industry faster than the last. What we are looking for 8-15 years of experience in enterprise sales, technical account leadership, or a commercial role with direct revenue ownership. We will make exceptions for exceptional people in either direction. Experience selling technical software into retailers, consumer brands, or e-commerce and supply-chain organizations, with an understanding of how merchandising, supply chain, and store operations buy differently. Comfort with retail’s operating rhythm: seasonality and peak freeze windows, thin margins, franchise and store-level variation, and integration with POS, ERP, and order-management systems. The technical credibility to hold a substantive conversation with engineers and security teams without needing an engineer in the room for every exchange. Evidence of early-stage commercial work: opening a segment, landing first customers for a product without an established category, or building a territory from very little. Strong discovery instincts. You can tell the difference between an interesting conversation and a real problem with a budget owner and a path to production. Executive presence and high EQ. You can earn trust with a COO, a head of operations, a CISO, and a staff engineer in the same week. AI-native. You use modern AI systems in your own work, and you can speak about agent capabilities and limitations from direct experience rather than from a deck. Comfort with startup ambiguity, broad ownership, and regular customer travel. A 30-minute introductory conversation. Two 60-minute conversations, one on how you find and develop enterprise opportunities and one on technical discovery for an agent deployment. A working session where you present a segment and account plan for a real part of your industry, using the research and judgment you would apply on the job. Own an industry at a company defining a new enterprise category. Sell a technical product to technical buyers, alongside engineers who deploy it with you. Work on deployments where the outcome is measurable operational change, not a shelf‑ware license. Shape which problems Sycamore solves next through what you learn in the market. Join early enough to build the commercial playbook rather than inherit it. Receive competitive cash compensation and meaningful equity in the company you are helping build. Hard problems, real impact Trust architectures, memory systems, multi-agent coordination. The foundational layer that makes agentic apps work in production. Small team, high ownership Every engineer shapes the product and the culture. No layers of process between you and the work that matters. Backed by the best $65M from Coatue, Lightspeed, Abstract Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, 8VC, and notable industry angels. Grow with us Competitive compensation, meaningful equity, and a genuine focus on your growth as the company scales. #J-18808-Ljbffr Sycamore Labs, Inc.