Enterprise Account Executive

Duckbill Group; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 135,000 - 165,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) with company match

Full vision and dental coverage

20 days paid time off

Unlimited sick leave

Early-stage equity options

Job summary

Duckbill Group in San Francisco is seeking an experienced Account Executive to lead full sales cycles and build a consistent pipeline. You'll inherit demand from our existing efforts and will be integral in driving sales for our cutting-edge cloud financial data platform, Skyway.

Ideal candidates will have 2-3 years of AE experience and thrive in a fast-paced, hands-on environment. We're looking for someone who is excited about the complexities of cloud cost management and AI and is ready to make a substantial impact.

Qualifications

• 2 to 3 years of experience as an Account Executive.
• Ability to run 30-plus active deals effectively.
• Curiosity for cloud and AI related products.

Responsibilities

• Own the full sales cycle from qualification to closing.
• Continuously build pipeline through various channels.
• Utilize HubSpot for managing deal flow and CRM data.

Skills

Sales cycle management

Pipeline building

CRM proficiency

Cloud cost management insights

AI utilization in sales

Job description

Join us on a mission to untangle cloud cost management.

Duckbill was founded in 2019 as a small boutique services firm focused on a single problem: helping organizations manage their AWS costs. Since then, we’ve grown into one of the most trusted and experienced companies in this space, as evidenced by our customer logos, press coverage (NYT, CNBC, GeekWire, GeekWire again, SiliconAngle, The Information), and longevity.

Our work has afforded us a front row seat to the most difficult problems in cloud cost management, and the insight to build exactly the services needed to solve them. We are now launching Skyway, a cloud financial data platform to ingest, parse, structure, normalize, and clean consumption and billing data from all cloud providers an organization uses.

With an estimated TAM of $5 billion in 2030 for AWS alone and $47.5 billion for all of public cloud by 2030, the opportunity is enormous.

Who we are looking for

We’ve built something that enterprise customers genuinely value — they’re paying us, renewing, and referring others — with a relatively small team. We have a lot of one-off things that have worked well, and it’s now time to build scalable strategies and execute on them.

This means two things for people we are hiring: 1) you will have a real impact on where we go, and 2) you don’t need your hand held to get there.

We win by being open and straightforward with our customers. Internally, that translates to honest communication, putting customers first, and collaborating without politics or egos getting in the way.

We are also fairly irreverent, and we like to have fun when we are not heads down in this cloud economy thing.

Fortune 500 clients, million-dollar contracts.

No soul-sucking scripts — just clever, human conversations that close.

Teammates who are equal parts kind, brilliant, and unfiltered.

Health

Vision

The company provides vision insurance and covers 100% of the premium.

The company provides dental insurance and covers 100% of the premium.

Retirement

All employees are eligible for our 401k plan.

Paid time off

We want you at your best and well-rested, so the company provides a PTO policy of 20 days per year.

Sick leave

It sucks to work when you’re sick. That’s why the company offers unlimited sick leave to all employees.

Open positions

Location

Employment Type

Full time

Location Type

On-site

Department

Compensation

About Duckbill

We are developing a SaaS product called Skyway that simplifies financial planning and analysis of cloud billing data for large enterprises with complex cloud spending requirements.

Duckbill has spent the last seven years helping companies understand, manage, and negotiate their cloud and AI spend. We’ve worked with hundreds of enterprises, negotiated tens-of-billions in cloud and AI contracts, and built one of the best-known brands in the cloud world.

What we haven’t had is a full sales team.

Like a lot of startups, our founding AE has moved into a Head of Sales role after spending years closing deals with help from our Cloud Economists, negotiators, and product team. Now we’re scaling the team up.

You’ll inherit demand, active opportunities, a known brand, and a market we’ve been working for years. You’ll also be expected to create pipeline, run deals, and help build a sales org that can scale.

Why this role exists

Enterprise cloud and AI spend is changing faster than most companies can manage it. For years, cloud cost management mostly meant finding waste in an cloud bill. While that still matters, it is not enough anymore.

Companies are now making large commitments across AWS, Anthropic, OpenAI, Azure, GCP, neoclouds, and inference providers without benchmarks, tooling, or visibility into whether the contracts they are signing are any good.

In response, we’re building Skyway, our platform for managing commercial terms and compute commitments across cloud and AI providers. It comes directly from the work we’re already doing with customers: helping them understand their commitments, negotiate better contracts, and make better, more informed decisions for their business.

The loop is simple. We help a customer with an expensive contract problem. That gives us trust and context. Skyway helps the customer forecast and manage those commitments over time. The next contract cycle gives us another reason to be in the room.

That’s the business we need you to help build.

What makes this hard

The buyer is changing.

While we still sell to FinOps and cloud cost teams at traditional enterprises, the best conversations are increasingly happening with AI-native or AI-active companies where engineering, finance, and infrastructure leaders are all circling the same problem.

The first person to feel the pain might be in engineering, strategic finance, infrastructure, or procurement, and budget ownership may not be clear when you arrive. You have to be comfortable entering through whichever door is open and helping the company figure out who needs to be in the room.

Sales cycles are usually 90 to 120 days. You’ll need to stay close to the account, keep the next step alive, and know the difference between real urgency and wishful thinking.

We do not have an SDR team filling your calendar. Inbound is consistent and it converts well, but it will not carry the number by itself, so you’ll need to work to build pipeline on your own.

What you’ll do

Own the full sales cycle. Qualify, run discovery, manage follow-up, work the buying group, and close.

Build pipeline continuously. Inbound opportunities, outbound, closed-lost re-engagement, referrals, events, partner conversations, and the Duckbill customer network will all be part of how you build your book.

Take over real opportunities quickly. In the first 30 days, you’ll learn the market, the customer problems, the Duckbill story, and the way we qualify deals. After that, you should be running more of the pipeline with less hand-holding and taking over opportunities already in flight.

Keep HubSpot useful. We know most salespeople would rather be selling than updating the CRM. Same. But if we’re going to build a truly extraordinary company and team, the CRM data has to be usable. Notes, next steps, closed-lost reasons, and deal context need to be current enough that all of us can learn from them.

Run useful discovery. We work closely with the product team, so we’ll want you to tell us what you are hearing: where buyers are confused, where the pitch is landing, and where the offer needs to change. We need you to notice those patterns.

How we work

You’ll get more ownership than you may be used to. We are a small team, around a twenty people today, and we hire people who can take responsibility without needing every step prescribed.

We care about pace and follow-through. If you say you are going to follow up, follow up. If a deal is not real, say so. If HubSpot is wrong, fix it.

We use AI throughout the company and expect you to as well: account research, call prep, follow-up, summarization, messaging tests, pipeline analysis, and whatever else helps you do better work faster. AI skeptics will not do well here.

About you

You probably came up through SDR. You know how to create pipeline because you have done the work yourself, not because leads showed up neatly assigned in a queue.

You’ve been in an AE role for 2 to 3 years and are ready to own a book that is actually yours. You can run volume without letting the details fall apart: 30-plus active opportunities, multiple people involved in each deal, and a pipeline that constantly needs to be refilled.

You do not need to be a cloud or AI expert on day one. You do need to be curious. If a conversation turns technical, you should lean in, not check out.

You are not scared by a big number. We expect you to sell, not sit back and sort inbound, and we pay accordingly for those results. We do not expect you to arrive fully ramped on day one, but we do expect you to be excited by the size of the opportunity and willing to do the work required to earn it.

We strongly prefer someone in San Francisco. Our market is concentrated here, and events, dinners, and face time with customers are part of the job.

This role is not for you if…

You need a large support org around you. You’ll have support from our Head of Sales, founders,, a strong technical team, and a real product to sell. You won’t have a team of BDRs, SEs, and proposal writers doing the surrounding work.

You want a whale-hunting role where you spend most of the quarter on two or three accounts. There will be big deals here, but this job is higher-volume than that. You need to be able to keep 30-plus real opportunities moving without losing the thread.

Your plan is to work inbound and “get to outbound later.” Inbound matters here, but it will not carry the number.

You need a fully formed category before you can sell. Buyers will not always have a clean budget owner, buying process, or internal vocabulary for the problem.

You roll your eyes at AI as a daily productivity tool. We use it everywhere, and we expect the same from the sales team.

We’ve been doing customer research for seven years. Duckbill started life as an advisory firm in 2019 and has worked primarily with large enterprises since day one. There’s no one else in the market that understands the problems customers are facing better than we do.

The work compounds. Every customer engagement teaches us something new about pricing, commitments, usage patterns, concessions, and buyer behavior. That makes Skyway better, which makes the next customer conversation sharper.

People know us. We operate the largest cloud community outside of AWS itself: 35,000 newsletter subscribers, 5 million podcast downloads, and 100,000-plus social media followers. Nearly every serious tech company on cloud knows who we are. Cold outreach is still work, but you will not be explaining who Duckbill is from scratch.

This role pays a $150,000 base with $300,000 OTE, plus early-stage equity.

We provide a 401(k), healthcare, vision, and dental benefits with premiums fully covered by the company. Dependents are covered 50%. We offer four weeks of PTO, plus unlimited sick leave.

About Us

We are a small and growing team of ~15, which means you get the opportunity to be on the ground floor of building the product and company. Our founders are domain experts in the market+problem space, bringing deep industry and customer connections in cloud cost management to the product.

We're backed by Heavybit and Uncork Capital, having raised $7.75 million , along with substantial revenue.