EMEA Sales Lead

Firstwork; Greater London; On-site; GBP 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Firstwork is seeking its first commercial hire in Europe to own enterprise revenue across the EMEA region and to build the local team around you. You will adapt the North American sales motion for Europe, while hiring SDRs and account executives alongside the CEO to form a high‑performing pod.

You will forecast with discipline to inform the executive team and ensure sustainable growth, while aligning with regulatory and procurement realities across European markets.

Qualifications

• 7+ years selling complex enterprise software with multi‑million deals.
• Experience selling into European markets across multiple sectors.
• Proven track record hiring and leading reps while carrying own quota.
• Ability to engage and influence C‑level stakeholders including compliance/CTO.
• Comfort with a tooling‑driven, data‑backed sales motion.
• Willingness to be candid with the CEO and drive faster decision cycles.

Responsibilities

• Own enterprise revenue across EMEA and carry deals from first meeting to signature.
• Build and qualify pipeline in staffing, healthcare, logistics, manufacturing, and retail.
• Turn North American playbook into a European model others can run.
• Hire the pod: SDRs, account executives, and key team members with the CEO.
• Forecast accurately to enable executive planning.
• Feedback field insights to product relevance and roadmap.

Skills

Enterprise software sales

European market experience

Quota leadership

Team-building

Executive presence

Sales tech stack

Candor with CEO

Job description

About Firstwork

Labour markets are broken. Millions of people are ready to work and can't start. Screening, right-to-work checks, contracts, onboarding and scheduling still run across disconnected systems, with hundreds of manual decisions in between. Firstwork builds AI agents that run frontline workforce operations end to end. We activate hundreds of thousands of workers a month globally for some of the world's largest employers and staffing firms, working forward-deployed inside the customer's operation. Backed by Y Combinator and Gradient (Google’s AI fund), with offices in New York, with London and Dubai opening later this year.

Why this role

European customers are not evaluating us out of curiosity. Workforce compliance has turned into a board-level risk and there are deadlines attached to it. The demand is already here. What we don't have is coverage, or an enterprise motion that repeats.

You are the first commercial hire in Europe and you build the team around you. It is a player-coach role and it stays that way, because we are not going to put someone in charge of coaching a European motion; they have never run against European buyers themselves. You carry a quota while you hire. A Solutions Consultant joins alongside you, SDRs come after that, and how the pod fits together is your call.

None of this starts from zero. The North American playbook holds up on qualification, pricing, security review and technical validation. Your job is to work out which parts of it survive European procurement, works councils and regulators, rebuild the rest, and turn the result into the thing every rep in the region runs.

What you'll do

• Own enterprise revenue across EMEA, and carry your own deals from first meeting through to signature

• Build and qualify pipeline in staffing, healthcare, logistics, manufacturing and retail

• Turn the North American motion into a European playbook other people can run

• Hire the pod. SDRs, account executives, and with the CEO, the first five people on the team

• Forecast well enough that the exec team can plan the company against it

• Get what you hear in the field back to product while it still matters

What we're looking for

• Seven or more years selling complex enterprise software, with six and seven figure closes you can talk us through in detail

• Time selling into staffing, healthcare, logistics, manufacturing and/or retail

• Deals across more than one European market, so you know how procurement, works councils and regulators change the shape of a cycle

• Experience hiring and managing reps while still carrying your own number

• The ability to hold a room with a Head of Compliance and a CTO in it at the same time

• A territory run on tooling rather than headcount. AI for account mapping, call prep, proposals and pipeline hygiene, and we will ask to see the stack

• No difficulty being wrong in front of the CEO

If you have built a commercial team once and think the second one would be better, we should talk.

Firstwork is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, or any other protected status.