Account Executive

Cintrifuse; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Industry-competitive salary

Equity above market

Premium medical + dental + vision

Dependent coverage

Relocation assistance

Daily lunches

Unlimited PTO

401k + company match

Job summary

Kernel is seeking a technically-leaning Account Executive to own the full sales cycle from prospecting to close. You will engage developers and engineering leaders, understand architectural requirements, and collaborate with solutions engineering, customer success, and product teams to move deals forward.

In this role, you will build relationships with technical decision-makers, manage complex negotiations, and help define a scalable sales motion for Kernel's AI-native platform.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of closing experience in a sales role, ideally selling technical or developer-facing products.
• Comfortable selling to technical buyers: discuss architecture, APIs, and how a product is used.
• Experience running a full-cycle sales process from outbound or inbound lead through negotiation and close.
• High tolerance for ambiguity — customers building things without a playbook yet.
• You use AI daily in your workflow and are excited to be in an AI-native space.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, with judgment to loop in teammates or close independently.

Responsibilities

• Own your pipeline end-to-end: prospecting, qualification, discovery, negotiation, and close.
• Build and manage relationships with developers, engineering leaders, and technical decision-makers evaluating Kernel for production use.
• Partner with solutions engineering, customer engineering/success, and engineering to scope technical requirements and keep deals moving from demo to signed contract.
• Give the team an accurate, up-to-date read on your pipeline and deal status.
• Represent the voice of the customer internally, feeding market and competitive intelligence back into product and go-to-market strategy.
• Help define what a repeatable sales motion looks like at Kernel — you're building the playbook, not just running one.

Skills

Closing experience

Technical sales

Full-cycle sales

AI familiarity

Developer tools knowledge

Job description

About Kernel

Kernel is crazy fast, open source browser infrastructure for AI agents. We handle autoscaling, observability, and the messy details of web interaction, so developers can focus on what their agents do instead of how they do it.

Teams at Cash App, Rye, and 5000+ others use Kernel for deep research, QA automation, and real-time web analysis. We've raised $22M from Accel, YC, and Vercel.

If you're interested in building critical infrastructure for agents on the web, we'd love to chat.

About the role

You'll be one of the first members of a lean sales team. You'll own the full sales cycle for Kernel, from initial conversation to closed deal. That means prospecting and qualifying the right accounts, running discovery that gets to the real problems a customer is solving, and building relationships with the developers and technical leaders who'll rely on Kernel for their production systems.

This is a technical-leaning AE role. You'll spend time understanding prospects' technical requirements, not just running a deck, and you'll lean on customer success & solutions, engineering, and product team members to keep technical questions from slowing down a deal.

What you'll do

• Own your pipeline end-to-end: prospecting, qualification, discovery, negotiation, and close

• Build and manage relationships with developers, engineering leaders, and technical decision-makers evaluating Kernel for production use

• Partner with solutions engineering, customer engineering/success, and engineering as needed to scope technical requirements and keep deals moving from demo to signed contract

• Give the team an accurate, up-to-date read on your pipeline and deal status

• Represent the voice of the customer internally, feeding market and competitive intelligence back into product and go-to-market strategy

• Help define what a repeatable sales motion looks like at Kernel — you're building the playbook, not just running one

What we're looking for

• 4+ years of closing experience in a sales role, ideally selling technical or developer-facing products

• Comfortable selling to technical buyers: you don't need to write code, but you can hold your own in a conversation about architecture, APIs, and how a product actually gets used

• Experience running a full-cycle sales process, from outbound or inbound lead through negotiation and close

• High tolerance for ambiguity — most of our customers are building things that don't have a playbook yet

• You use AI daily in your own workflow, and are excited to be in an AI-native space

• Excellent written and verbal communication, with the judgment to know when to loop in teammates versus close on your own

Even better:

• Experience selling developer tools, infrastructure, or API-first products

• Familiarity with AI agents, browser automation, or the broader agent tooling landscape

• Prior experience at an early-stage startup where you helped build the sales process, not just execute one

What you can expect as a Kernel

• Industry-competitive salary

• Above market equity

• Premium medical + dental and vision coverage + dependent coverage

• Small, trusting team of experienced GTM and engineering staff

• Default async with minimal bureaucracy

• Daily lunches on us

• Unlimited PTO

401k + company match

• Relocation assistance