Director, Demand Sales

Paraform; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Paraform is seeking a Director to own new business and shape the demand org for the fastest-growing startups in the country. You will lead six to eight account executives and build a second line with future managers.

You’ll design segmentation, vertical coverage, and a scalable outbound motion that leverages VC networks, founder communities, dinners, and conferences to generate pipeline and close deals.

Qualifications

• 7–10 years in sales with four-plus years leading, and visible progression through them.
• You've managed managers, or you're unambiguously ready to.
• Network-led outbound you've personally owned, with investors or events that built pipeline.
• You've built a playbook from scratch and handed it to a team.
• Strong analytical instincts and data-driven decision making.
• Genuine curiosity about Paraform's marketplace model and how to go upmarket.
• Something non-linear in your background, showing unusual career path.

Responsibilities

• Own new business end to end: pipeline generation, deal execution, and attainment across the AE team.
• Design the org: segmentation, vertical coverage, headcount, and upmarket coverage.
• Build the second line: promote internally and hire externally to create a manager bench.
• Install the social-selling motion: VC referrals, dinners, conferences, and repeatable processes.
• Take us upmarket: shift to longer sales cycles and strategic accounts with revenue sharing.
• Partner with marketing, engagement, and product to align go-to-market across the business.

Skills

Sales leadership

Network-led outbound

Playbook development

Team building

Forecasting

Job description

About Paraform. Paraform is the first end-to-end AI recruiting marketplace, connecting companies with thousands of specialized recruiters and AI agents that work together to fill roles faster and more accurately. We hire for companies like Ramp, Decagon, Rippling, and Hightouch, and we 8×'d revenue last year. We're an early-stage, fast-moving team combining a network of expert recruiters with agentic AI tooling.

The role. We're hiring a Director to own new business at Paraform — the team, the motion, and the shape of the org that comes after it. You'll inherit our A-team of six to eight account executives selling into the fastest-growing startups in the country, and within a couple of quarters you'll be hiring managers underneath you and building a second line. You'll report to our Head of Demand Sales and sit as a core member of the Demand leadership team alongside marketing and engagement management.

Two things make this a Director seat rather than a management seat. The first is that the demand org's structure is genuinely undecided — segmentation, vertical coverage, and the path upmarket are yours to design, not to inherit. The second is that the outbound motion has to be rebuilt from the ground up. Our AEs already cold call and send LinkedIn messages; it isn't the motion that wins in our market. The pipeline that converts here comes out of VC networks, founder communities, dinners, and conferences — investors making introductions because they know you personally. You've built pipeline that way yourself, you've taught a team to do it, and you can install it as a system.

What you'll do

• Own new business end to end. Pipeline generation, deal execution, and attainment across the AE team, with a high-velocity motion into seed through Series B founders. You carry the number and the forecast.

• Design the org, not just the team. Decide how we segment, where verticalization earns its keep, what the headcount plan looks like, and how coverage changes as we go upmarket. Bring a point of view and defend it.

• Build the second line. Promote from within where you can and hire externally where you can't. Within two to three quarters you should have at least one manager reporting to you and a bench behind them.

• Install the social-selling motion. Build the VC-referral loop, the dinner program, and the conference presence our outbound is missing — then make it a repeatable system that runs without you in the room.

• Take us upmarket. AEs own accounts for 30 days today, which is deliberately high-velocity and, yes, disincentivizes long-tail growth. We're moving to a 60–90 day window with revenue sharing on strategic accounts targeted for Q1. How we actually climb from SMB and seed/Series A into larger accounts is an open question you get to answer.

• Partner across the business. Work with marketing and engagement management on liquidity, and with product on how our next products go to market — we'll be multi-product within six months.

What we're looking for

• 7–10 years in sales with four-plus years leading, and visible progression through them. Manager → senior manager → director, or a comparable arc. We're looking for slope: quick promotions, scope that compounds, and ideally an IC-to-manager promotion inside the same company because it means someone bet on you. Long tenure at a flat level is a negative signal for us, not a neutral one.

• You've managed managers, or you're unambiguously ready to. You can name the first-time managers you promoted, how you de-risked those bets, and what you'd do differently.

• Network-led outbound you've personally owned. You can name the investors you worked with and the events you built pipeline from. If your team's pipeline came from marketing, or from SDR-style cold calling with no network layer, this isn't the right fit.

• You've built a playbook from scratch, run it yourself, and handed it to a team — and you can show the evidence it scaled past you.

• Strong analytical instincts. You don't need to write SQL, but you know exactly what to ask the data, how to validate it, and how to design a hypothesis-driven intervention when the number is off.

• Genuine curiosity about our model. Paraform is a marketplace, not a straight-line SaaS product, and that trips people up. We want someone who asks sharp questions and pushes back in the first conversation, not someone who nods along.

• Something non-linear in your background. Founders who went on to scale inside a real organization, athletes, academics, ex-finance operators, or anyone with a pattern of deliberately choosing unusual businesses. This shows up disproportionately in the people who do well here.

Nice to have: multi-product platforms or fintech selling to startups — Rippling, Ramp, Brex, Mercury, Vanta and similar. Ex-investment-banking or consulting before startup sales.

Why you'll love it

• You're building the demand org, not staffing it. The structure past the current team is undecided, and the person in this seat decides it.

• A real path to second line and beyond. You'll be managing managers by Q2 with the mandate to hire them yourself. The VP seat above this is open and nobody is lined up for it.

• Multi-product within six months. You'll shape how new products go to market, not just sell what exists.

• The upmarket motion is unbuilt. We're making real money in SMB and seed/Series A and we're nowhere near upmarket. You can be the person who figures out how we get there.

• You'll sell to the hottest companies in tech. The logos on our platform are the ones everyone else is trying to get into.

Location: San Francisco (in office).

About Paraform:

Paraform is a marketplace modernizing one of the largest and most fragmented markets in the world: hiring. We partner with industry leaders like Decagon, Palantir, Rippling, Abridge, and Hightouch to hire world-class talent, and are growing quickly - 8×-ing revenue last year.

Paraform is the first end-to-end AI recruiting marketplace that connects companies with thousands of specialized recruiters and AI agents that work together to fill roles faster and more accurately.

Our mission is to make hiring fast, reliable, and scalable for every company in the world.

At Paraform, we believe recruiting works best when the right people are working on the right problems, combining human judgment with AI that truly understands hiring. That’s why we’re building a new foundation for how companies hire, bringing together specialized recruiters and modern AI tools.

We treat recruiters like entrepreneurs, not vendors – and we’re building the financial, operational, and technical infrastructure that powers their success.

We are backed by the best investors and technology leaders: Scale, Felicis, A*, BOND, Liquid 2, DST Global, the founders of YouTube, Instacart, Canva, and more.