Account Executive, High Tech

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

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Competitive benefits

In-person in SF

Job summary

Goodfire is hiring an Account Executive to own strategic accounts in the LLM market, focusing on frontier labs and AI-native companies. You will progress opportunities end-to-end, negotiating terms and expanding engagements across complex technical organizations.

You will engage CTOs, Heads of AI, and research leaders, combining consultative selling with deep technical fluency to drive safer, more capable AI systems.

Qualifications

• Must have experience owning and closing complex sales cycles with technical or research-oriented buyers.
• Strong discovery, commercial judgment, and ability to connect a technical product to a customer problem.
• Ability to learn language models, reasoning systems, agentic workflows, and model evaluation concepts quickly and communicate credibly with engineers and CTOs.

Responsibilities

• Own strategic sales cycles: build pipeline, run discovery, negotiate agreements, and close new partnerships.
• Develop vertical account strategies to map the LLM market and prioritize high-value accounts.
• Translate technical roadmaps into commercial opportunities and identify customer needs across model development, evaluation, safety, and deployment.
• Partner with the Field Team to shape pilots, scope technical engagements, and define success criteria for expansion.
• Build vertical-specific playbooks and scalable sales motions.

Skills

Complex sales

Technical buyers

Discovery

Commercial judgment

Executive communication

Job description

About Goodfire

Goodfire is a research company using interpretability to understand, learn from, and design AI systems. Our mission is to build the next generation of safe and powerful AI—not by scaling alone, but by understanding the intelligence we're building.

Scaling has proven powerful, but today's approach is fundamentally limited: we can't meaningfully understand, debug, or shape what models learn. Every engineering discipline has been gated by fundamental science and AI is at that inflection point now.

We're advancing the science of how AI systems actually work. Treating models as black boxes is an unnecessary handicap—we have access to the structures inside them, and understanding those structures lets us steer what models learn, make them safer and more useful, and extract the vast knowledge they contain. Our goal is to make AI that can be understood, debugged, and shaped like software.

Goodfire is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco with a team of the world’s top interpretability researchers and engineers from organizations like OpenAI and DeepMind. We're backed by over $200M from B Capital, Menlo Ventures, Lightspeed, Eric Schmidt, and others.

About the role

We're looking for an Account Executive to focus on the LLM market and close strategic partnerships across frontier labs, AI-native companies, and the broader tech domain. This role demands consultative selling ability, technical fluency, and strong market judgment: the ability to understand the language model landscape, build thoughtful account strategies, and identify where Goodfire can help customers build safer, more capable AI systems.

This is a high-autonomy role where you will play a key role in defining our go-to-market motion for the Large Language Model market. You will own strategic accounts end to end: developing market-specific account plans, running discovery with deeply technical buyers, partnering with the Field Team to scope pilots, negotiating commercial terms, and expanding successful engagements across complex technical organizations.

Our buyers are CTOs, Heads of AI, and research leaders. You'll need to be technically curious, precise, and credible enough to earn trust with technical teams.

Key responsibilities

• Own strategic sales cycles: build pipeline, run discovery, navigate technical and executive stakeholders, negotiate agreements, and close new partnerships.
• Develop vertical account strategies: map the LLM market, identify the right wedge, and prioritize accounts where Goodfire can create meaningful value.
• Translate technical roadmaps into commercial opportunities: understand customer needs across model development, evaluation, safety, reliability, perception, planning, autonomy, and deployment.
• Partner with the Field Team: shape pilots, technical scopes, success criteria, and expansion paths that demonstrate real impact for customers.
• Build vertical-specific playbooks: test messaging, qualification criteria, deal structures, and repeatable sales motions

Required experience

• Experience owning and closing complex sales cycles with technical or research-oriented buyers.
• Strong discovery, commercial judgment, and ability to connect a technical product to a concrete customer problem.
• Ability to learn language models, reasoning systems, agentic workflows, and model evaluation concepts quickly and communicate credibly with engineers, researchers, CTOs, and Heads of AI.
• Ability to manage a complex technical sales motion while understanding customer workflows and success criteria.
• High agency, strong written and verbal communication, and comfort operating without a fully mature sales playbook

Preferred qualifications

• Experience selling AI/ML, infrastructure, developer tools, data platforms, security, or other deeply technical products.
• Familiarity with language model development, reasoning systems, agentic workflows, model evaluation, or model deployment workflows.
• Track record selling to CTOs, Heads of AI, research leaders, ML platform teams, or technical executives

Our values

Goodfire is looking for individuals who embody our values and share our deep commitment to making interpretability accessible. We are building a team first and foremost.

Put mission and team first

All we do is in service of our mission. We trust each other, deeply care about the success of the organization, and choose to put our team above ourselves.

Improve constantly

We are constantly looking to improve every piece of the business. We proactively critique ourselves and others in a kind and thoughtful way that translates to practical improvements in the organization. We are pragmatic and consistently implement the obvious fixes that work.

Take ownership and initiative

There are no bystanders here. We proactively identify problems and take full responsibility over getting a strong result. We are self-driven, own our mistakes, and feel deep responsibility over what we’re building.

Action today

We have a small amount of time to do something incredibly hard and meaningful. The pace and intensity of the organization is high. If we can take action today or tomorrow, we will choose to do it today.

Where we work

We are hiring for this position in our San Francisco HQ. We are in person 5 days a week, with one company-wide remote week per month.

What we offer

This role offers market competitive salary, equity, and competitive benefits.