Founding Account Executive

Roark (YC W25); San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 120,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Roark is seeking a Founding Account Executive to own the full sales cycle from prospecting to close in a technical, developer‑facing product space.

You will run credible demos for engineers and AI teams, build a repeatable go-to-market motion, and work closely with founders to shape pricing and playbooks in a remote-friendly SF-based role.

Qualifications

• 3+ years closing technical or developer-facing products.
• Full-cycle sales experience sourcing pipeline and booking demos.
• Technical fluency to discuss Roark with engineers and AI teams.

Responsibilities

• Own the full cycle end-to-end: prospect, book, demo, negotiate and close — no SDR to hand off from and no sales engineer to hide behind (yet).
• Run technically credible demos yourself with engineers and AI teams, answering hard questions live.
• Build top-of-funnel outbound to teams shipping voice agents and rapid inbound follow-up to keep pipeline moving.

Skills

Full-cycle selling

Technical fluency

Pipeline development

Closing deals

Tools

CRM

Slack

Live demo environments

Job description

All roles

Open role

Founding Account Executive

Go-to-market

• Remote
• San Francisco

Be the first person here whose whole job is turning interest into customers. You own the full cycle — source the pipeline, book the demo, run it yourself, and close. Roark is a technical product bought by engineers and AI teams, so you win by being credible in that room, not by reading a script. This is the seat that turns a great product into a real business.

What you'll do

• Own the full cycle end-to-end: prospect, book, demo, negotiate and close — no SDR to hand off from and no sales engineer to hide behind (yet).
• Run technically credible demos yourself — show engineers and AI teams how Roark tests, scores and monitors their voice agents, and field the hard questions live.
• Build the top of the funnel: outbound to teams shipping voice agents, inbound follow-up in minutes not days, and a motion repeatable enough to hire against.
• Get hands-on with the product — connect an agent, run a simulation, read a scorecard — so your demo is the real thing, not slides.
• Be the voice of the customer inside the company: route objections, lost‑deal reasons and feature gaps straight to the founders and engineering.
• Write the first go‑to‑market playbook messaging, qualification, pricing conversations so the next five reps ramp in weeks, not quarters.

What you'll bring

• 3+ years closing technical or developer‑facing products (dev tools, infra, APIs, ML/AI or observability), carrying a number and hitting it.
• Full-cycle reps: you have sourced your own pipeline and booked your own demos, not just closed what marketing handed you.
• Technical fluency — you can hold your own with engineers, learn a product deeply, and demo it without a sales engineer in the room.
• Real hunger for the top of the funnel: relentless follow up, and happy to build pipeline from zero.
• Based in the San Francisco Bay Area we are fully remote (no office), but we want this seat in SF, close to customers and to founders on the ground.

Nice to have

• You have been an early or founding go‑to‑market hire before, and can sell before the category fully exists.
• Familiarity with voice AI, LLMs, evals, or the teams building conversational agents.
• You thrive with founders and little structure you would rather write the playbook than inherit one.

Toolkit: Roark platform

• live demo environments
• your CRM of choice
• Slack
• direct founder access