About the Role
We're hiring a Founding Account Executive to own and build a repeatable new-logo sales motion for a category-defining AI simulation agent product. You'll join a small, founder-led team at the ground floor, run full-cycle enterprise sales into large engineering organizations, and turn early wins into the playbook that future sellers will inherit. This is a high-ownership, high-impact role where you'll directly shape go-to-market strategy and feed product feedback loops.
What You'll Do
- Own the full sales cycle — from outbound prospecting through close — for net-new enterprise accounts.
- Convert warm, founder-sourced opportunities and inbound interest into closed deals while independently building new pipeline.
- Demo the simulation AI agent solo and design technical evaluations that validate value within customer models and workflows.
- Navigate complex buying committees, aligning CAE/simulation champions with VP/Director-level economic buyers.
- Run targeted account plans against engineering teams that currently use tools such as ANSYS, SIMULIA, Altair, or Simcenter.
- Develop qualification criteria, discovery frameworks, evaluation templates, and objection-handling guides that form the foundation of the company's sales playbook.
- Feed learnings back to the product team to improve the agent and evolve future sales motions.
- Build repeatable processes and documentation that future sales hires will execute against.
What We're Looking For
Must-haves (dealbreakers):
- 6+ years of full-cycle, outbound-driven hunting in complex, technical B2B deals targeting engineering or manufacturing organizations — with a verifiable track record of sourcing and closing net-new logos against quota.
- Ability to run unaided software demos and real technical evaluations with engineering teams — no reliance on a Sales Engineer in the room.
- Fluency with AI agents and LLMs; able to articulate concrete engineering value and the practical constraints of agentic workflows in CAE/simulation environments.
Required:
- Experience owning the complete sales motion: outbound prospecting, discovery, technical evaluation, procurement navigation, and close — without pre-generated pipeline.
- Demonstrated ability to sell to CAE/simulation stakeholders and build credible bridges to engineering managers and VP/Director-level buyers in enterprise settings.
- Experience building and executing a go-to-market playbook in a founding or early-stage sales environment.
- Comfortable with ambiguity — founding-hire temperament with a bias for action and documentation.
Nice to have:
- Direct experience selling into environments that use ANSYS, SIMULIA, Altair, or Siemens Simcenter — as a vendor rep, reseller, or competitor regularly engaging these tool owners.
- Background selling CAD/CAE/PLM/EDA or adjacent deep-tech (dev tools, MLOps, infrastructure) into large enterprises.
- Formal background in mechanical, aerospace, or a related engineering discipline, or strong domain fluency to converse credibly with engineers.
- Prior early or founding sales hire experience highly desirable.
Location & Work Arrangement
This role is on-site in San Francisco, CA. Visa sponsorship is not available for this position.
Compensation & Details
- Employment type: Full-time
- Compensation details were not specified for this role — competitive package expected at a well-funded early-stage company.