Account Executive (AE)

Vectara; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 80,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive base salary

Uncapped variable compensation

Equity grant opportunities

Job summary

A fast-growing enterprise AI startup is looking for a motivated Enterprise Account Executive in Chicago to own the complete sales cycle from outreach to contract signing. Ideal candidates will have 3–8 years in B2B SaaS sales targeting technical buyers. The role involves navigating complex enterprise accounts, building customer relationships, and leveraging the engineering team to secure deals. Competitive salary with uncapped commissions and equity opportunities are offered.

Qualifications

• 3–8 years of experience in enterprise or mid-market B2B SaaS sales to technical buyers.
• Ability to navigate multi-stakeholder deals across IT, security, legal, and business lines.
• Proven record of building customer relationships and earning their trust.

Responsibilities

• Own the full sales cycle from first outreach to signed contract.
• Find, develop, and close your own opportunities.
• Partner closely with the engineering team to leverage technical expertise.

Skills

Enterprise B2B SaaS sales

Technical sales experience

Building customer relationships

Networking

Closing deals

Job description

Vectara is the trusted Agentic platform for the enterprise. We help companies turn their most valuable — and often most sensitive — data into AI assistants and agents that are accurate, grounded, and production-ready. Where most teams spend months stitching together many products, Vectara delivers an end-to-end platform out of the box, with multimodal ingestion, proprietary hallucination detection (HHEM), and the flexibility to run in SaaS, a customer VPC, or fully on-premise.. The result is that engineering teams ship real AI applications in weeks instead of quarters — without compromising on security, data control, or answer quality.

Our work is validated by some of the most demanding technology, financial services, and semiconductor companies in the world.

• Broadcom has standardized on Vectara as the central platform for Agentic RAG and Conversational AI. Combining Agentic RAG and Search together powers their customer facing support serving 3M users.
• Texas Instruments uses Vectara for air-gapped on-prem search that accelerates design-in decisions.
• Compass Real Estate replaced a five-person engineering effort with a single AI expert building on Vectara.
• Aon enables non-technical analysts to query complex claims data in natural language.

The business outcomes are concrete. Customers consistently describe Vectara as the moment their AI strategy went from experimentation to production.

Joining Vectara means joining a growing, well-funded company at the exact inflection point when enterprise AI is moving from pilots to scale. You will work alongside a team that has built some of the most influential search, retrieval, and machine-learning systems in the industry. The problem space is large, the market is early, and the impact of every hire is visible.

We are looking for the few people who have the grit to join a Series A startup that is growing rapidly in a quickly evolving market. You are someone who doesn't back down from a challenge and will do what it takes to make it successful. You want to be part of a team that puts in the hours with pipeline generation, finding deals by networking and creativity, and 100% hustling. You are effectively the owner of your business in the region and a founding Enterprise Account Executive. If this fits you, continue reading.

Own the full sales cycle from first outreach to signed contract. You find, develop, and close your own opportunities. Inbound marketing is in place but consider that extra.

• Sell into complex enterprise accounts where the buyer is technical (VP of Engineering, CIO, CDO, Head of AI/ML) and the problem is real — data sprawl, compliance risk, AI accuracy, knowledge retrieval at scale.
• Navigate multi-stakeholder deals across IT, security, legal, and the business line. Build champions, map the org, and drive consensus.
• Develop deep expertise in Vectara’s platform so you can answer hard technical questions, and earn the trust of engineering-led buyers.
• Partner closely with our engineering team — we have a very large engineering org relative to sales, and they’re your secret weapon. Bring them into deals early and often.
• Build your territory from scratch. Create your own target lists, develop your own outbound sequences, and generate pipeline through hustle, creativity, and relentless follow‑up.
• Give direct feedback to the product team. At this stage, what you hear from the market shapes what we build next.

Qualifications

• 3–8 years of enterprise or mid‑market B2B SaaS sales experience, ideally selling technical products to technical buyers.
• Prov… [truncated for brevity]

Your customer relationships and their trust matters more than the length of your experience.

Compensation & Equity

We pay competitively and we put real equity on the table. This is a Series A company with Fortune 500 clients and a technology moat in the fastest‑growing market in enterprise software. The financial upside for early sales hires is substantial.

• Highly Competitive base salary + uncapped variable compensation
• Meaningful early‑stage equity grant (pre‑growth round, maximum upside)
• The chance to build something from the ground floor with a team that has done it before