Founding Strategic Account Executive

The Role

As the founding strategic account executive, you'll win new business and drive revenue for Applied Compute across the F500. You'll help enterprises understand what Specific Intelligence looks like inside their organization. You'll leverage your consultative sales expertise to become a trusted partner to customers, helping them embed and deploy AI and scale into a multi-workstream partnership over time. In collaboration with applied AI and platform engineers, you'll continuously refine our value proposition, sales methodology, and platform positioning to ensure specific value across each client.

What You'll Do

• Win new business and drive revenue for Applied Compute. Find the right entry points at prospective customers, educate them on what Specific Intelligence is and why it's different, and guide them from first conversation through close. You'll own the full sales cycle end-to-end
• Maintain client partnerships over time to grow engagements into multi-workflow partnerships
• Sell into senior technical buyers (CTOs, Heads of AI/ML, VP Engineering) with confidence and credibility
• Spearhead market expansion by identifying new customer segments, industries, and use cases. Collaborate cross-functionally with applied research, product, and leadership to refine our positioning and sustain a competitive edge
• Collaborate with applied research engineers, product, and leadership to continuously refine our value. Inform product direction by translating customer feedback, objections, and market signal back to the team

What We're Looking For

• 3-5 years of enterprise sales experience at an AI or AI-adjacent company, with a track record of personally closing large ACV deals with technical buyers
• A consultative, solutions-oriented approach to selling. You understand multifaceted technical requirements and tailor your narrative to each account rather than running a standard demo
• Intellectual curiosity about AI/ML. You want to understand how the technology actually works, and you can hold your own in a room full of engineers after a briefing
• You have opinions about product and you naturally feed signal back to the product team
• A strategic sense for where budget lives and how deals get structured

Strong Candidates Also Have

• Experience selling into enterprise environments where the buyer is evaluating build-vs-buy for AI/ML infrastructure
• A track record of expanding initial engagements into large, multi-workstream partnerships over time
• Existing networks across F500 technical leadership
• Experience at companies where the sales motion is deeply technical and consultative
• Hiring experience: you've recruited salespeople before and have a strong eye for talent

About Us

Applied Compute builds Specific Intelligence for the enterprise. We provide the continual learning infrastructure for companies to build agent workforces trained on proprietary data and institutional expertise. Our researchers and platform embed directly within customer environments to build custom evals, train models, and deploy agents that get better with use.

• Why We're Excited: We get to work at a rare intersection. Our product team builds the platform powering a new generation of digital coworkers. Our research team pushes the frontier of post-training and reinforcement learning. Our applied AI team sits side-by-side with customers as they ship agents into production. This combination of strong product, deep research, and boots on the ground is what we believe it takes to bring AI to the enterprise. We are product-led, research-enabled, and forward-deployed.

• Who We Are: We're a team of engineers, researchers, and operators. Many of us are former founders. We've built RL infrastructure at OpenAI, data foundations at Scale AI, and systems at Together, Two Sigma, Watershed, and others. We work with F50 customers and are fortunate to be backed by partners like Kleiner Perkins, Benchmark, Sequoia, Lux, and Greenoaks.

• Who Thrives Here: We're looking for people who are excited about applying novel research and complex systems to real-world problems. Our team genuinely enjoys working with customers: listening, empathizing, and understanding how work actually gets done in their organizations. Former founders, people who've built a lot of side projects, or anyone who's shown they can own something end-to-end, tend to do well here.

Benefits & Logistics

This role is based in San Francisco. We work from our office in the Mission. We offer:

• Competitive compensation and equity
• Generous health benefits
• Unlimited PTO
• Paid parental leave
• Daily lunches and dinners
• Transportation and relocation support
• Retirement plans

We sponsor visas. While we can't guarantee success for every candidate or role, if you're the right fit, we're committed to working through the process with you. We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. As set forth in Applied Compute's Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.