Enterprise-AI Sales Team lead

Zeko AI; Dadri; On-site; INR 2,500,000 - 4,500,000; Full time

Job summary

Zeko AI, a cutting-edge AI hiring platform, is seeking a Sales Lead to run the sales team day-to-day and own the number. You will coach, structure territory allocations, and build a repeatable process for enterprise deals, from discovery through close.

You will work closely with the founder on pricing and strategic directions, while scaling the team’s performance. You will manage AE and SDR resources, drive pipeline discipline with evidence, and deliver a credible forecast to the CEO and board.

Job description

Zeko AI builds AI agents for hiring and talent evaluation. Our core product, Avya, runs structured L1 interviews end to end. It's a real conversation with an AI avatar that adapts its follow-up questions to what the candidate actually says, then produces a scored, evidence-backed report a recruiter can act on in under three minutes.

Around that sits a full stack: resume and recruiter screening, voice-based candidate engagement, post-offer follow-up, L2 panel scheduling, proctored assessments, job validation, and AskAvya, a layer that lets a hiring manager interrogate a candidate report in plain language.

Where we are

• Growing 20% quarter on quarter. Unit economics that work per account, not growth bought with discounts.
• Enterprise customers with high renewal rates. Persistent, Nagarro, Orion Innovation, Sopra Steria, Schneider Electric, Cholamandalam, Shadowfax, Pierian Services.
• We survive enterprise scrutiny. InfoSec reviews at Banks and global IT services firms, EU AI Act clauses, DPDPA, SLA and uptime commitments we wrote ourselves. ISO 27001, SOC 2, ISO 42001 and ISO 27701 are in progress. For a seller this matters: it means the deals you work are real, and they close.
• Best AI Startup awarded 25 lacs by Hon’ble Minister of Electronics and IT at India AI Summit. Top 20 Startups among 10,000+ applications at UAE-India CEPA Council.

Why this is a good seat

The category is being created right now, and we are early in it. Every enterprise TA function in India is being asked what it is doing about AI. Most do not have an answer. You will not spend your quarter explaining why the problem exists, you will spend it showing a buyer a better way to run something they already do badly.

We sell to serious buyers. TA Heads, CHROs, L&D Heads, CISOs, transformation leaders. Deals run ₹5L to ₹1Cr+ with pilots, security reviews and procurement. This is enterprise selling with a real cycle, not transactional SaaS.

You get founder-level context. The CEO runs sales directly. You will not be three layers away from the person who sets pricing, ships the product and talks to the board. Decisions that take a quarter elsewhere take a day here.

High AI exposure to improve performance. An AI coach runs over our own call recordings. Your demos and negotiations get reviewed against evidence, not impressions. If you want to get materially better at selling within twelve months, the instrumentation for that already exists.

The next eighteen months are the interesting ones. The plan is 6x growth in ARR. Whoever joins now builds the function rather than inherits it: the playbook, the verticals, the team. That is a different experience from joining at ₹100 Cr, and it is the honest reason to pick us.

About the Role

You run the sales team day to day and you own its number. The test of whether you are succeeding is not how much of that number you closed. It is how much of it you did not.

The real version of this role

We will be direct about what you are walking into, because you will find out in week two anyway.

You are joining over an experienced incumbent. Our current Sales Lead stays as a senior Account Executive with her own book, and she will report to you. She has been here through the accounts you are about to inherit and she knows things you will not for six months. How you handle the first thirty days with her matters more to your success than anything you do with the pipeline.

The junior bench is thin. Of four SDRs, the two strongest recently left. You inherit two people with a few months' experience each, with three or four more joining. There is no established top performer for them to copy. Part of your job is to become the model of what good looks like, and then make yourself unnecessary as that model.

The founder runs revenue and will not be leaving the room entirely. The CEO holds the top accounts, out-of-band pricing, and non-standard legal terms, and appears at executive level when a buyer wants a founder present. Everything else is genuinely yours. There is a written list of what he does not touch, and holding him to it is part of your mandate, not an imposition on it.

If that reads as a warning, it is not meant to. It is the shape of a real job at this stage, and a person who wants a clean slate with a strong bench would be unhappy here regardless of what the JD said.

What you own

• The team number: across Account Executives and SDRs
• Quota allocation, territory and account assignment, and defending the split when it is challenged
• Weekly pipeline review run on evidence: coverage ratio, stage conversion, cycle length, not opinion
• A forecast the CEO and the board can rely on
• Coaching. Real coaching, using call recordings and pipeline data, in a cadence people can plan around
• Ramping new AEs and SDRs: including building the model of "good" this team currently lacks
• Second chair on commercial conversations, holding concession discipline without taking over the call
• Holding the qualification bar when pipeline looks thin, which is exactly when it drifts
• Selling personally, but only on the team's top three accounts and no more than 20-30% of your time

What good looks like after twelve months

• The team hits its number and you personally closed a minority of it
• At least one AE you developed is at full quota attainment
• The team can forecast accurately when you are not in the room
• New joiners reach productivity inside two quarters, with a ramp plan that exists on paper
• The segment playbook is documented and other people are running it
• The incumbent Sales Lead is performing well and has not been diminished by your arrival

You will do well here if

• You have developed named sellers to quota and can say who and how long it took
• You coach by asking rather than telling, and you use evidence rather than instinct
• You can hold authority without asserting it, particularly with someone more tenured than you in the company
• You are comfortable building structure where none exists, and comfortable that it will change again in two quarters
• You would rather watch an AE make a recoverable mistake than take the call yourself

What this role is not

• It is not a super-AE seat with a title. If your best year is a story about deals you personally closed, this is the wrong role.
• It is not a pod-lead role yet. We do not have verticals at this headcount, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. The vertical structure comes later and you will help design it.
• It is not a buffer between the team and the founder. You will be in the room with him constantly and expected to disagree.

What we offer

Base plus variable carrying a team number. Direct reporting line to the CEO with genuine influence on pricing, segment strategy, hiring and comp design. A function at the point where what you build actually compounds: the team roughly triples over the next eighteen months, and the structure you set now is the structure it scales on. A clear path to leading the whole revenue function as it verticalises.

How we hire

We do not run interviews on impressions. Every role is assessed against the same written competencies with the same rating scale, and every rating has to point at something you actually did or something we watched you do in the process.

Expect live exercises rather than only conversation: a cold-call roleplay for the SDR seat, a negotiation roleplay for the AE seat, a coaching exercise on a real call recording for the Team Lead seat. You will be told what each exercise is testing before it starts. We would rather see you work than hear you describe working.

Your interview ratings are shared with you and become the baseline for your first quarterly review, so the process is also the start of your development plan.

Stage and Turnaround Time

• AI Interview with functional depth, with our AI, Avya- so that you experience what we sell. Role fitment, knowledge and attitude. When: Instantly when you apply, if you are shortlisted.
• Competency interview with live exercises, with Sales Lead or CEO. When: 24-48 hours of AI Interview
• Conversation with the Founders. When: 4-5 working days after Stage 2
• Reference checks, then offer. When: within 4-5 working days after Stage 3

What we will not pretend about

• We are still building. The playbook exists but it is not finished, and parts of it you will write. If you need a mature system to operate inside, we are not it yet.
• Enterprise cycles are long. Six to twelve months with pilots and security reviews. Your first quarter will not look like your fourth.
• Everyone is close to the work. The CEO reads deal notes. That is useful when you want a decision and uncomfortable if you would rather not be observed.
• We check what we claim. Attainment, meeting numbers and team development claims are verified at reference stage before an offer, not after.