Founding Account Executive

Hired By Startups; Dublin; Hybrid; EUR 70,000 - 80,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Dublin office with flexibility

Uncapped commissions

Path to leading sales team

Job summary

Hired By Startups in Dublin is seeking a Founding Account Executive for a high-growth AI startup. You will inherit a live pipeline, run demos, and close initial deals from day one.

You will own new business end-to-end with no sales engineer and will hunt for opportunities while guiding an outsourced SDR team. Equity is offered as part of meaningful ownership.

Qualifications

• Record of closing B2B software deals of $30k+ with cycles of a few weeks to four months.
• Hunter's instinct to build your own pipeline from day one.
• Experience selling a technical product and asking sharp questions about large data.
• Experience at an early stage company and no training programme required.
• Ability to build trust fast; buyers should want to work with you soon after a first call.
• Written communication that is genuinely yours; avoid generic AI-generated prose.
• Background beyond light-touch, product-led sales; ambitious to build and scale.

Responsibilities

• Inherit a substantial live pipeline and booked meetings on day one, running your own demos and closing your first deals in month one.
• Own new business end to end, from first call to signed contract, with no sales engineer behind you.
• Hunt your own deals from day one on top of the meetings the SDRs book. Outbound on email and LinkedIn.
• Steer the outsourced SDR team on who they call, what they say and which meetings are worth taking.
• Find the operator in every deal, e.g., VP Ops, GTM Engineer, Head of Product Marketing, CPO or CEO.
• Turn paid first months into annual contracts, staying close to the account while the product team runs implementation.
• Take over every new first meeting by month two and own the pipeline and forecast by month three.
• Work with the CEO to rethink how the product is priced, packaged and positioned.

Skills

Hunter mindset

Closing B2B deals

Technical product sales

Early-stage startup experience

Trust building

Job description

Dublin (office based, with flexibility)

AI infrastructure startup

At Hired By Startups, we've partnered with an early stage AI infrastructure startup to hire their first Account Executive.

The startup turns a company's own messy, unstructured data into a structured data model that plugs straight into the AI tools their teams use every day. Where MCP gives access to raw data, this layer extracts, classifies and counts what's in it, so teams can run analysis, automations and agents accurately across their entire dataset, not just whatever fits in a single prompt.

The CEO is a second-time founder with a notable exit, and has run every sale personally up to now. They've done it well: dozens of paying customers, strong and growing ARR, and a proven outbound engine booking meetings every week. The business is well funded with several years of runway, and average deal sizes have climbed sharply this year as they've closed in on product-market fit.

If you're looking for a Founding Account Executive role at a high growth AI startup, selling a technical product that isn't just a wrapper, with established pipeline, a growing customer base and a clear path to scaling with the company and building a team, this could be the one for you.

About the role

As Founding Account Executive, you will:

• Inherit a substantial live pipeline and booked meetings on day one, running your own demos and closing your first deals in month one.
• Own new business end to end, from first call to signed contract, with no sales engineer behind you.
• Hunt your own deals from day one on top of the meetings the SDRs book. Outbound on email and LinkedIn is still unsolved, so you'll work out what works.
• Steer the outsourced SDR team on who they call, what they say and which meetings are worth taking.
• Find the operator in every deal, the person trying to build on this data, whether that's a VP Ops, GTM Engineer, Head of Product Marketing, CPO or CEO.
• Turn paid first months into annual contracts, staying close to the account while the product team runs implementation.
• Take over every new first meeting by month two and own the pipeline and forecast by month three, with the CEO still closing alongside you.
• Work with the CEO to rethink how the product is priced, packaged and positioned.

About you

As Founding Account Executive, you'll need:

• A record of closing B2B software deals of $30k and up on cycles of a few weeks to four months, and numbers you can back up.
• A hunter's instinct. You can build your own pipeline from day one, not just work what's handed to you.
• Experience selling a technical product. You'll learn the data model properly and ask sharp questions about working with huge volumes of data.
• Time at an early stage company, and no need for a training programme to get going.
• The ability to build trust fast. Buyers should want to work with you within minutes of a first call.
• Writing that's genuinely yours. Follow ups, proposals and one-pagers win deals, and AI slop won't cut it.
• A background beyond light-touch, product-led sales. If most of your deals are small self-serve upgrades, this isn't the one.
• Ambition. You want to make serious money and learn how a company gets built.

Salary, Location, Benefits

• €70k to €80k base depending on experience, €125k to €135k OTE
• Uncapped commission on new ARR, guaranteed at 100% for your first two months
• Meaningful equity, issued before the next funding round
• Dublin, in the office most days, with flexibility once trust is built
• Whatever kit you need
• A path to hiring and leading the sales team if this works