Founding Account Executive

Capitol AI; Washington (District of Columbia); Hybrid; USD 270,000 - 330,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity participation

Comprehensive health benefits

Hybrid work environment

Job summary

Capitol AI is seeking a Founding Account Executive based in Washington, DC to lead the enterprise sales cycle. This role involves building significant business in financial services, government, and professional services. You will work closely with senior leadership to shape sales strategy and culture.

Ideal candidates will have a robust background in enterprise software sales and deep technical understanding of AI. Compensation includes $300,000 on-target earnings plus equity. A hybrid work model is preferred, but exceptional remote candidates are considered.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in enterprise software sales.
• Success in selling to financial services, professional services, or government.
• Deep understanding of AI, cloud, and cybersecurity.

Responsibilities

• Own the full enterprise sales cycle from prospecting to closing.
• Build and execute account plans across targeted verticals.
• Lead conversations with senior technical buyers.

Skills

Enterprise software sales

Technical leadership

Negotiation skills

Communication

Tools

Salesforce

HubSpot

Job description

Location: Washington, DC (headquarters). On-site / Hybrid preferred.

On-Target Earnings: $300,000 (competitive base plus performance-based commission) with meaningful equity.

Verticals: Financial Services, Professional Services, Government.

Summary Capitol AI is hiring its Founding Account Executive: the first dedicated enterprise seller, focused on building pipeline and proving the go-to-market motions that the company will scale. This is not a role for someone waiting on inbound leads or an existing playbook. It is for an operator who can generate pipeline from a standing start, design and test repeatable GTM motions, open the most discerning accounts in financial services, professional services, and government, and close them.

Reporting to the VP of Sales, you will own the full sales cycle end to end, from first conversation to signed contract, selling sovereign intelligence infrastructure into institutions where the cost of being wrong is measured in regulatory exposure, market consequence, and national security. The right person is exceptionally skilled commercially and technically enough to be a thought leader in AI: someone who can hold the room with a CTO, a CISO, or a Chief Data Officer, then translate that credibility into revenue.

This is a foundational hire. The pipeline you build, the motions you prove out, the messaging you sharpen, and the accounts you land will set the template for how Capitol sells as the team grows. You will work closely with the VP of Sales, CEO and CTO, product, and engineering, and you will help shape a culture that is mission-focused and values openness, collaboration, and respect.

What You Will Do

• Own the full enterprise sales cycle. Prospect, qualify, run discovery, lead technical demonstrations, navigate procurement and security review, negotiate, and close. You are accountable for pipeline and bookings from the first touch to the signature.
• Win in three high-stakes verticals. Build and execute account plans across financial services, professional services, and government, prioritizing the institutions where sovereignty, auditability, and control are non-negotiable.
• Be the technical voice in the room. Lead conversations with senior technical and business buyers such as CTOs, CISOs, Chief Data Officers, heads of AI, partners, and agency leadership. Speak fluently about secure on-premises and air-gapped deployment, model-agnostic architecture, governed agentic workflows, and the difference between generic AI and decision-grade infrastructure.
• Build pipeline and prove the GTM motions. Generate qualified pipeline through outbound, partnerships, and targeted account work. Design, test, and refine the prospecting and sales motions that the team will scale, with the VP of Sales, as Capitol grows. Document what works, kill what does not, and feed insight back to product and marketing.
• Carry Capitol's voice in the market. Represent the company publicly as a credible thought leader on sovereign AI: at conferences, in customer briefings, and in written and spoken commentary. Shape how the most critical institutions think about the future of enterprise AI.
• Partner across the company. Collaborate closely with the VP of Sales, product, and engineering to align what we sell with what we build, and to ensure every commitment made in the field can be delivered in production.

What Makes a Great Founding AE Here

This role asks for a rare combination: the closing instincts of a top enterprise seller and the technical fluency of someone who could hold their own in an architecture review. The candidate we are looking for will:

• Have a genuine point of view on where enterprise AI is heading, and the ability to defend it in front of the most sophisticated technical and executive audiences.
• Understand the realities of regulated, mission-critical environments, including data residency, governance, evaluation, attribution, and audit, and why these requirements break most AI tools on the market.
• Be able to articulate Capitol's differentiation with precision: no data egress, model-agnostic by design, full audit trail, and decision-grade artifacts generated entirely inside the customer's environment.
• Sell value and consequence, not features. The buyers in these verticals cannot afford to be wrong, and the message has to meet them there.

Qualifications And Competencies

• 8+ years of enterprise software sales experience, with a proven record of carrying and exceeding quota in complex, multi-stakeholder deals.
• Demonstrated success selling into one or more of the target verticals: financial services, professional services, or government. Government and national security experience is a strong advantage.
• Deep technical literacy in AI, cloud, data infrastructure, or cybersecurity, with the credibility to lead technical discovery and influence architecture-level conversations.
• Experience navigating long sales cycles that include security review, procurement, and compliance, ideally in regulated or high-trust environments.
• Comfort operating with CRM and sales tooling such as Salesforce or HubSpot, and a data-driven approach to forecasting and pipeline discipline.
• Exceptional communication, negotiation, and executive relationship-building skills, including the presence to act as a public-facing voice for the company.

Who Succeeds In This Role

• A "can do" attitude and the resilience to thrive without an established playbook.
• The view that no task is too small. From administrative work to strategy, you do what the business needs.
• Pride in executing to the highest quality.
• Flexibility and the ability to switch contexts with ease.
• Independence and the capacity to operate with minimal oversight.
• A bias toward doing the work yourself rather than waiting to hire it out.

Compensation And Benefits

• $300,000 on-target earnings: competitive base salary plus performance-based commission.
• Meaningful equity participation as a founding member of the go-to-market team.
• Comprehensive benefits including health, vision, dental, and 401(k).
• Hybrid work environment.

Location This position is based in our Washington, DC headquarters. While we prefer on-site and hybrid candidates, we will consider exceptional remote candidates.

About Capitol AI Capitol AI is building the model-agnostic intelligence infrastructure for the world's most critical institutions. As enterprises rush to adopt AI, the real question is no longer whether to use it, but whether they retain control over their data, their models, and their decisions. Capitol runs entirely inside secure enterprise environments and transforms proprietary data into auditable, repeatable, decision-grade artifacts such as due diligence reports, regulatory documentation, and executive intelligence. The platform is model-agnostic, fully auditable, and operates with no data egress, giving institutions durable control over their data, workflows, and standards. This is AI that works for institutions, not the other way around. Backed by Y Combinator, Capitol operates in production across financial services, professional services, and government, the verticals where trust, compliance, and expertise are the core assets.