Founding Strategic Account Executive

River AI; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 350,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation assistance

Visa sponsorship

Equity

Job summary

River AI is seeking a founding Enterprise Account Executive in Palo Alto to drive revenue growth and enterprise adoption of River API. You will identify high-value segments, close early strategic accounts, and build partnerships while shaping go-to-market motion across sales, partnerships, product, and technical customer engagement.

You will translate customer needs into product requirements, design technical demonstrations, and guide customers from pilot to deployment, establishing scalable GTM

Qualifications

• Significant experience in enterprise sales, business development, partnerships, or go-to-market roles at AI, developer infrastructure, cloud, or enterprise software companies.
• Demonstrated 0-to-1 product or business build including initial market, early customers, and repeatable growth motions.
• Experience owning revenue targets and navigating complex enterprise sales cycles with technical understanding.
• Ability to communicate with both technical stakeholders and business executives.
• STEM education or technical work experience, or evidence of selling technical products.
• Strong ownership, judgment, and bias for action in fast-moving environments.
• Excellent relationship-building, negotiation, and written/oral communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Own revenue growth and enterprise adoption for River API, from strategy through execution.
• Identify industries, customer profiles, and use cases where post-trained models create maximum value.
• Build relationships with prospective customers and guide them from exploration through pilot, deployment, and expansion.
• Develop and manage a pipeline of enterprise opportunities, partnerships, and distribution channels.
• Contribute to River API’s early sales playbook, including positioning, pricing, pilots, procurement, and expansion.
• Collaborate with engineering and research to translate customer needs into product requirements.
• Design demos, proofs of concept, and customer solutions showcasing post-training open-weight models.

Skills

Enterprise sales

Go-to-market

Technical fluency

Stakeholder communication

Negotiation

Strategic thinking

Job description

At River AI, our mission is to create personal AI owned and shaped by each individual. To achieve this, we are building the full stack required for people and organizations to create AI models of their own—from training infrastructure and open-weight model post-training to personal hardware and next-generation interfaces.

Who we are

We are scientists, engineers, and builders from the industry’s leading technology companies and AI labs. Our team has experience scaling consumer products to hundreds of millions of users and building the infrastructure behind frontier AI systems.

About the Role

We are seeking experienced Founding Account Executives to drive the growth and adoption of River API.

River API makes it easy for companies and individuals to post-train open-weight models using their own data, creating models that are more effective, economical, and specialized for their use cases. Your goal will be to turn this technical capability into a rapidly growing business, with a particular focus on creating and closing enterprise sales campaigns.

You help create critical parts of River API’s go-to-market motion, from identifying high-value customer segments and closing early strategic accounts to developing partnerships and building repeatable systems for scaling adoption. This is a highly entrepreneurial, cross-functional role for a small group who can operate across sales, partnerships, product, and technical customer engagement.

What You’ll Do

• Own revenue growth and enterprise adoption for River API, from strategy through execution.
• Identify and prioritize the industries, customer profiles, and use cases where custom post-trained models create the greatest value.
• Build relationships with prospective customers, understand their technical and business requirements, and guide them from initial exploration through pilot, deployment, and expansion.
• Develop and manage a pipeline of enterprise opportunities, strategic partnerships, and distribution channels.
• Contribute to River API’s early sales playbook, including positioning, qualification, pricing, pilots, procurement, and account expansion.
• Work directly with engineering and research teams to translate customer needs into product requirements and improvements.
• Design technical demonstrations, proofs of concept, and customer solutions that clearly communicate the value of post-training open-weight models.
• Establish partnerships with model providers, cloud and GPU infrastructure companies, systems integrators, consultancies, and other participants in the AI ecosystem.
• Build scalable GTM systems, processes, and metrics while remaining deeply involved in closing River’s most important early customers.
• Represent River with customers, partners, developers, and the broader AI community.

Skills & Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

• Significant experience in enterprise sales, business development, partnerships, or go-to-market roles at an AI, developer infrastructure, cloud, or enterprise software company.
• A demonstrated track record of building a product or business from 0 to 1, including developing an initial market, winning early customers, and creating a repeatable growth motion.
• Experience owning meaningful revenue targets and navigating complex enterprise sales cycles.Strong understanding of how organizations evaluate, purchase, deploy, and expand technical products.
• Ability to communicate effectively with both technical stakeholders and business executives.
• Technical fluency developed through a STEM education, engineering or technical work experience, or extensive experience selling highly technical products.
• Exceptional ownership, judgment, and bias for action in ambiguous, fast-moving environments.
• Strong relationship-building, negotiation, and written and verbal communication skills.

Preferred Qualifications:

(We encourage you to apply even if you don't meet all of these)

• Experience selling or partnering around foundation models, model training, inference infrastructure, developer platforms, data infrastructure, or other AI products.
• Familiarity with open-weight models, fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, model evaluation, inference, or enterprise AI deployment.
• Experience personally closing early enterprise customers before building or scaling a broader sales organization.
• An existing network among AI-native companies, enterprise AI leaders, cloud providers, model developers, or systems integrators.
• Experience developing partnerships that materially contributed to product distribution or revenue.
• Comfort discussing APIs, model architectures, training workflows, data requirements, security, and deployment constraints with engineering and machine learning teams.
• Experience working closely with founders, researchers, and engineers to shape product strategy based on customer feedback.

Logistics & Benefits

• Location: Palo Alto, California.
• Compensation: Depending on experience and skills the expected base pay is $200,000 - $350,000 USD per year, plus equity.
• Benefits: Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance; unlimited PTO; and relocation assistance as needed.
• Visa Sponsorship: We sponsor visas and are committed to supporting the process for the right candidate.