Sales Compensation Lead

Fireworks AI; San Mateo (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Fireworks AI is seeking a Sales Commissions Lead reporting to the Revenue Operations leadership. You will own compensation strategy end-to-end, design consumption-aware plans, and collaborate with Sales, FP&A, HR, and Data Eng to align incentives with growth.

The role emphasizes building AI-native commission workflows, extending in-house tooling, and delivering executive-ready views of plan health and cost.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in sales commissions or incentive compensation with ownership of end-to-end plans.

Responsibilities

• Own sales compensation plan strategy and execution across AE, manager, and overlay roles.
• Design consumption-aware and hybrid commit + usage plans that align incentives with revenue goals.
• Partner with Sales leadership, FP&A, and HR on plan changes and field communication.

Skills

Sales operations

Incentive compensation

Cross-functional leadership

Forecasting

Automation

AI tooling

Executive communication

Tools

SQL

CRM systems

Billing data

In-house calculators

Job description

About Us

Fireworks is the platform for specialized intelligence, enabling companies to build, train, and serve AI models tailored to their own data, workflows, and products. Founded by the team behind PyTorch and backed by AMD, Atreides, Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures, Lightspeed, NVIDIA, Sequoia Capital, and TCV, Fireworks powers production AI with hundreds of state-of-the-art open models across text, image, embedding, audio, and multimodal workloads. Today, Fireworks is a Series D company valued at $17.5 billion, bringing together an ambitious, collaborative team that’s building the future of enterprise AI.

About Us

Fireworks is the platform for specialized intelligence, enabling companies to build, train, and serve AI models tailored to their own data, workflows, and products. Founded by the team behind PyTorch and backed by AMD, Atreides, Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures, Lightspeed, NVIDIA, Sequoia Capital, and TCV, Fireworks powers production AI with hundreds of state-of-the-art open models across text, image, embedding, audio, and multimodal workloads. Today, Fireworks is a Series D company valued at $17.5 billion, bringing together an ambitious, collaborative team that’s building the future of enterprise AI.

The Role

Reporting to the VP of Revenue Operations, the Sales Commissions Lead owns sales compensation end-to-end: plan strategy and design, field communication, dispute resolution, forecasting of commission expense, and the systems that turn closed deals and usage into accurate, trusted payouts.

This is not a pure admin seat and not a blank-slate build. You inherit a working in-house commissions stack and extend it — plan docs, calculators, data pipelines, reporting, and payout workflows — while partnering tightly with FP&A, HR/People Ops, Sales leadership, and Data Engineering. You will own compensation for a rapidly scaling GTM org (300+ commissionable sellers across pre-sales and post-sales roles).

Consumption and hybrid commit + usage economics are core to how we sell and how we pay. The right candidate has already owned commissions in a usage-based or hybrid commercial model — not only license ARR — and can design plans that drive the right field behavior without breaking Finance trust.

The right candidate is an AI-native builder: hands-on with agentic tools (Cursor, Claude Code, or equivalent), shipping automation into the commissions operating system rather than managing a spreadsheet forever.

Responsibilities

Plan Strategy & Design

• Own sales compensation plan strategy and execution across AE, manager, and pre-/post-sales overlay roles.
• Design and iterate consumption-aware and hybrid commit + usage plans that align seller incentives with company goals (new logos, expansion, and healthy revenue mix).
• Partner with Sales leadership, FP&A, and HR on plan changes, mid-period policy decisions, and clear field communication — including how changes are grandfathered and measured after the fact.

Payout Operations & Trust

• Own the quarter close for commissions: eligibility, calculations, exceptions, audits, and payout packages Sales and Finance will stand behind.
• Run dispute resolution with judgment — protect plan integrity while staying credible with FLMs and reps.
• Maintain definitional clarity (what counts as commissionable production, how credit is assigned, how overlays interact) and keep plan language, exhibits, and systems in sync.

Systems, Forecasting & Automation

• Inherit and extend our in-house commissions tooling and data pipelines — do not rip-and-replace for a vendor by default.
• Drive end-to-end automation of plan modeling, commission forecasting, attainment reporting, and payout production.
• Partner with Data Engineering and GTM Engineering on source-of-truth data (CRM, billing/usage, roster/quotas) so calculations are reproducible and auditable.

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Be the commissions point of contact for Sales VPs/FLMs, FP&A (commission expense and accruals), HR (exhibits, offers, terminations), and Data Eng.
• Produce executive-ready views of commission cost, plan health, and incentive risk — recommendations, not just tables.

AI-Native Operations

• Build agentic workflows into how commissions runs: rule interpretation, edge-case triage, rep-facing explanations, regression checks on plan changes, and automated reporting.
• Raise the bar for what "done" looks like: machine-readable plan logic, versioned assumptions, and tooling the field can self-serve against.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in sales commissions, incentive compensation, or sales ops with deep commissions ownership; senior IC depth at a P4-P5 equivalent
• Has familiarity with and owned multiple steps of end-to-end commission (plan design + payout ops), not only one side of the house
• Hands-on experience designing and administering plans in a consumption-based or hybrid commit + usage commercial model
• Strong systems builder: SQL (or equivalent) against CRM/billing data; comfortable extending in-house calculators and pipelines rather than only operating a packaged ICM tool
• Proven cross-functional operator with Sales, FP&A, HR, and technical partners — can say no to a bad exception and still keep trust
• Actively building with AI/agentic tools in current work; can name specific automation they've shipped (not "I use ChatGPT")
• Excellent written communication: can explain plan mechanics to a rep in plain language and to Finance in audit-ready form

Preferred

• Experience at an AI/ML infrastructure, developer tools, or API-first company
• Has scaled commissions through a high-growth headcount ramp (hundreds of sellers)
• Familiarity with manager overrides, overlay roles (e.g. SAs / field engineers), marketplace/channel credit, and self-serve sales-assisted conversion credit
• Prior ownership of commission expense forecasting / accruals partnership with FP&A

Why Fireworks?

• Solve Hard Problems: Tackle challenges at the forefront of AI infrastructure, from low-latency inference to scalable model serving.
• Build What’s Next: Work with bleeding-edge technology that impacts how businesses and developers harness AI globally.
• Ownership & Impact: Join a fast-growing, passionate team where your work directly shapes the future of AI—no bureaucracy, just results.
• Learn from the Best: Collaborate with world-class engineers and AI researchers who thrive on curiosity and innovation.

Fireworks AI is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all innovators.