Founding Account Executive

United States Digital Space LLC; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Hive in London is seeking a Founding Account Executive to launch and scale our UK market for autonomous industrial operations. You will inherit live UK opportunities, close expansions, and land new logos through a fast-deploy model with a UK plant hire partner.

This role is hands-on and highly collaborative, selling to site managers, HSE, finance and IT, and requiring frequent travel to construction sites and plants.

Qualifications

• Built something from nothing: a new market, a new region, a new product line or a business of your own.
• Proven track record of hitting or beating quota, and you can show the numbers.
• Experience selling something conceptual rather than off the shelf, with a strong business case.
• Complex deals with multiple stakeholders and quarterly sales cycles.
• You enjoy being on site at quarries, plants, construction sites and machines.
• A life situation that allows heavy travel.
• Right to work in the UK.
• Experience from a structured sales playbook environment.
• Network in UK construction, aggregates, building materials or plant hire.
• Experience expanding enterprise accounts across multiple sites.

Responsibilities

• Close and expand flagship accounts in the UK.
• Take over live opportunities with large UK customers and close the next sites.
• Own expansion after the first contract; the real revenue is in the next twenty sites.
• Build your pipeline through outbound efforts and the plant hire partnership.
• Land fast-deploying customers such as quarry operators alongside large accounts.
• Create demand where none exists yet and build the business case with customers.
• Run the deal end to end from first conversation to first machine running on site.
• Sell at site manager, HSE, finance, group IT and executive levels.
• Co-author the business case and internal documentation with a champion.
• Learn the solution well to handle technical questions without a pre-sales team.
• Document the UK sales approach and hand it to future hires.

Skills

Market creation

Quota achievement

Conceptual selling

Complex deals

On-site sales

Heavy travel

Right to work in UK

Structured sales playbook

UK construction network

Multi-site expansion

Job description

At Hive, we're building the defining physical AI platform of the next decade.

Industrial labor is one of the most acute bottlenecks in the global economy. Operators are expensive, hard to retain, and working in environments that are increasingly unsafe. The shortage is structural. The window to solve it is now.

Our answer is a machine-agnostic intelligence platform that lets any machine, on any site, perceive, decide, and act autonomously. One platform. Any machine. No fleet replacement.

Already live across multiple sites and customers in Europe - spanning logistics and warehousing, industrial manufacturing, and large-scale chemical production - with a US expansion underway.

The vision: one operator managing hundreds of machines simultaneously. Productive machine-hour cost dropping by 80x, and unlocks the next productivity revolution in physical work.

The mission is to make productivity limitless. Come and help us build it.

The Role

As Founding Account Executive for the UK, you will be the first dedicated heavy machinery seller in Hive's London team, covering the UK and Ireland.

You inherit a pipeline of large UK customers where Hive is already deployed or deploying. Your first job is to close the open expansions and take those accounts to new sites. In parallel you land new logos, including smaller quarry operators that can be deployed quickly, through our partnership with a UK plant hire company and its customer events.

The title is deliberate. You build this market from the start, and how far the role grows is decided by how you perform.

What You Will Do

Close and expand the flagship accounts

• Take over live opportunities with large UK customers and close the next sites.

• Own the expansion after the first contract. The real revenue is in the next twenty sites.

Build the UK market

• Build your own pipeline through outbound and through the plant hire partnership.

• Land fast-deploying customers such as independent and mid-sized quarry operators alongside the large accounts.

• Create demand where none exists yet. Most customers are not looking for this, so you find the process where it fits and build the case with them.

Own the deal end to end

• Run the deal from first conversation to the first machine running on the customer's site.

• Sell at every level at the same time: site manager, HSE, finance, group IT and the executive committee.

• Work with your champion as a co-author. Build the business case and the internal documentation with them, and help them drive the decision inside their company.

• Handle technical questions yourself. There is no pre-sales team behind you, so you learn the solution well.

Write the playbook

• Document how Hive sells in the UK, and hand it to the people we hire after you.

What We're Looking For

Essential

• You have built something from nothing: a new market, a new region, a new product line or a business of your own.

• A consistent track record of hitting or beating quota, and you can show the numbers.

• Experience selling something conceptual rather than off the shelf. Software, software-enabled hardware, automation or systems integration, where you had to build the business case yourself.

• Complex deals with multiple stakeholders, C-level economic buyers and sales cycles measured in quarters.

• You enjoy being on site. Quarries, plants, construction sites and machines interest you.

• A life situation that allows heavy travel.

• Right to work in the UK.

Strongly Preferred

• Experience from a structured sales playbook environment.

• A network in UK construction, aggregates, building materials or plant hire.

• Experience expanding enterprise accounts across multiple sites.

This Is Probably Not the Job for You If

• You need a process to exist before you can work inside it.

• You prefer not to travel. Expect to be on the road most weeks.

• You have only sold machines or equipment. Selling a wheel loader and selling autonomous operation of a wheel loader are very different jobs.

• You hand over documentation and wait for the inbox to answer.

What Success Looks Like

• The open expansions in the flagship accounts are signed and running.

• New logos are signed, including customers reached through the plant hire partnership.

• A pipeline of UK opportunities you built yourself.

• Hive has a written UK sales playbook that the next hire can use.