Founding Account Executive (NYC)

Socket.dev; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 1,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Socket.dev is hiring a founding Account Executive to close deals with CMOs and VPs of Marketing at mid-market B2B companies. You’ll manage the full sales cycle from discovery to close, leveraging CQ’s agents to craft tailored demos and accelerate pipeline. You’ll split time across coasts with two founding hires, traveling 20–40% to meet prospects in person.

Base salary ranges from $150k–$250k with a flat 15% of first-year ARR, uncapped. At plan, total comp can reach about $1M in the first year.

Qualifications

• You’ve carried a quota and beaten it.
• You can walk us through end-to-end deals and multithreading.
• You close in person or on a live call, not via paper.
• You’ve sold to marketing leaders or can quickly fluently discuss HubSpot, Marketo, ABM and demand gen with CMOs.

Responsibilities

• Run deals from first meeting to close: discovery, demos, pilots, contracts.
• Sell to CMOs and VPs of Marketing at mid-market B2B companies.
• Use CQ's agents to prep: custom demos with the prospect’s real brand before each call.
• Spend time with CMOs for case studies and references to fuel the next deal.
• Travel 20-40% to meet prospects in person.

Skills

Closing deals

Quotas

Deal negotiation

In-person selling

Tools

HubSpot

Marketo

ABM tools

Job description

What we’re building

Enterprise marketing still runs through agencies because launching one campaign means coordinating specialists across Marketo, HubSpot, Meta, LinkedIn, CMSs, and a dozen other systems. It takes weeks.

CharacterQuilt uses computer‑use agents to do that work inside the software companies already use. A campaign that took three months can now ship in two days. We were among the fastest‑growing companies in YC Spring 2026 - $1.5M to $3.5M in revenue during the batch alone - and just raised a $13M seed round.

The story: we built a Clay replacement, then ran an agency for 12 months. That's why the agents actually work - we did every one of these jobs by hand first. Customers like Follett ($2B company) and Asana ($2B company) are genuinely launching campaigns in 1 day instead of 1 month.

Bhairav, my co‑founder, did AI research at NASA, NVIDIA, and MIT. When a customer buys CQ, they’re buying forward‑deployed engineering in their marketing team. My background is SDR, then AE, then product marketing, then demand gen - I've done all the GTM jobs.

The role

You’ll be one of two founding sales hires - we’re hiring both at the same time, one for each coast. You’ll close deals with me (Clint).

If you’ve sold to marketers before - martech, ABM tools, marketing automation - that’s a big bonus, because our buyer is the CMO and you’ll ramp faster speaking their language. But we’ll teach you the domain.

This is not an SDR role. Every great AE generates some of their own meetings, but we have a full marketing engine - dinners, outbound, demand gen - that generates plenty of pipeline. Your job is to close it. And you’re working for a founder who has actually done the SDR job and the AE job, not one who thinks sales is a vending machine.

I want this person to make $1M in their first year with us :). And beyond the money, you’d learn absolutely everything about AI in marketing by working with Bhairav and me - and selling what every CMO is trying to figure out right now.

What you’ll do

Run deals from first meeting to close: discovery, custom demos, pilots, contracts.

Sell to CMOs and VPs of Marketing at mid‑market B2B companies.

Use CQ's own agents to prep - we build a custom demo with the prospect's real brand and campaigns before every single call.

Spend about a quarter of your time with our customer CMOs: case studies, referrals, and peer references that feed the next deal.

Travel 20-40%. Meeting people in person helps close deals.

You might be a fit if

You’ve carried a quota and beaten it. You can walk us through deals you ran end to end - how you multithreaded, how you handled the negotiation, how you got the signature.

You close in person or on a live call, not by sending paper and waiting.

You’ve sold to marketing leaders before, or you can get fluent in HubSpot, Marketo, ABM, and demand gen fast enough to talk to a CMO without faking it.

You’re genuinely obsessed with what AI is doing to marketing.

$150-250K base plus a flat 15% of first‑year ARR, uncapped. At plan that’s $1M total and we want you to earn $1M in your first year. Commission starts paying at pilot signature and pays in full when the pilot converts to annual - no clawbacks, ever. Over 85% of our pilots convert. 0.2% to 1% equity, standard four‑year vest - lower base pairs with the higher end of the band. Based in the NYC area.

About the interview

1. A founder conversation about the best deal you’ve ever closed and why you want to sell AI to marketers.


2. A live screen: you run discovery and a pitch on me - I play the CMO.


3. A deep dive on your deal history: pipeline walkthrough, multithreading, how you actually close.


4. A paid work trial: prep and run a full first meeting on a real CQ‑built custom demo, with us as the buying committee. No external contact.


5. References and a direct offer conversation.

We will share the purpose and rubric before every stage. The paid work trial is a mutual test of judgment, preparation, and whether we’d want to be in a deal with you.