Sales Manager

Light Labs; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 120,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Health insurance

Generous PTO

Job summary

Light Labs, headquartered in Austin, TX, is seeking a Sales Manager to own and grow a high-value book of business with leading CPG brands. The role emphasizes land-and-expand strategies, rapid responsiveness, and heavy on-site client engagement across plants and HQs.

You will drive expansion revenue, map growth plans for accounts, and collaborate closely with product, marketing, and operations to scale the GTM engine. Heavy travel and on-site presence are required.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated go-to-market trajectory and top-tier sales performance.
• Proven track record growing a book of business with multi-stakeholder accounts.
• Strong relationships built over years with customers and partners.
• Relentless responsiveness as a standard for communication with customers.
• Experience developing clear account plans and expansion strategies.
• Clear, persuasive written and verbal communication skills.
• Curiosity about testing processes and translating tech concepts to business value.
• Willingness to travel and spend substantial time on-site with clients.
• Ability to operate in Austin, with in-office presence five days a week.

Responsibilities

• Lead and expand a multi-million-dollar book of business with top manufacturers and brands.
• Create and execute expansion plans to land new testing programs and product lines.
• Respond to inquiries and requests within minutes to maintain momentum.
• Travel to plants, HQs, and events to build relationships and perform business reviews on-site.
• Represent the customer’s voice inside Light Labs and flag risks or delays proactively.
• Resolve issues creatively, turning challenges into growth opportunities.
• Gain deep knowledge of testing methods and regulatory thresholds relevant to customers.
• Collaborate across teams to ensure alignment on accounts and driving revenue expansion.
• Feed customer insights back to product, marketing, and operations to shape roadmap.
• Build scalable playbooks from successful account strategies.

Skills

Go-to-market plan

Book of business

Relationship building

Responsive

Account planning

Communication

Curiosity

Willing to travel

Austin on-site

Job description

Light Labs

Powering a healthier food system through data, transparency, and accountability.

Sales Manager

Light Labs | Austin, TX (In-office, 5 days a week)

The Opportunity

Are you a salesperson who grows accounts by showing up, answering fast, and learning the customer's business better than they expect? Someone who can turn a first test into a seven-figure program? Then you'd be a great fit as our Sales Manager. You'll own and grow a book of some of the largest manufacturers and brands in CPG. There's no playbook yet. The team knows what works but hasn't written it down, and you'll help build the system the rest of the team runs on.

Why Light Labs

Testing is a cost line everywhere else. Here it's a growth line.

Brands publish their Light Labs results directly on their own product pages. That turns a QA budget item into something that moves conversion, which is why customers keep expanding what they test with us, and why the constraint on this business is lab capacity, not demand.

We've gone from zero to a multi-million-dollar run rate in under two years. Next up is 4x revenue over the coming year and a $50M run rate in 2027. We're on the verge of being introduced to roughly 20 new accounts, each worth at least $500K in potential spend, in an industry so tightly networked that doing right by one well-connected customer opens the door to the next three.

What You’ll Own

This is a land-and-expand seat. Average deals run around $250K and reach $1–2M+ at the top end. There's no fixed contract term, accounts take about six months to mature, and customers are testing and evaluating us continuously, so nothing is ever set and forget. Expect to spend about 80% of your time growing your existing book and 20% hunting alongside a paired SDR.

• Run your book like your own P&L. Know every account's health, whitespace, and growth plan, and own the expansion revenue it produces.
• Map the path to expansion, then drive it. Build a clear, executable plan for each account to land new testing programs, product lines, sites, and use cases. Your quota is expansion revenue, and the biggest growth here comes from going deeper with the customers we already have.
• Respond within minutes. Speed is the number one reason customers work with us. It's the standard for every email, call, and result question in your book.
• Always get on the plane. Nothing beats in-person time. Visit plants and HQs, walk the floor with quality and ops teams, and run business reviews on site.
• Be the customer's voice inside the lab. If we're about to miss a committed turnaround time, you get ahead of it, spell out the revenue impact, and push for real care in how it's handled. You're also the lab's voice with the customer, flagging risks before they become escalations.
• Solve problems instead of routing them. A failed result, a quality issue, a regulatory question: get creative and drive it to resolution.
• Learn the science. Methods, contaminants, specs, and regulatory thresholds like Prop 65. Enough to speak your buyers' language and earn trust with technical stakeholders, without waiting for someone to teach you.
• Go multi-threaded. Build trust across quality, operations, regulatory, procurement, and the executive team so no account hinges on a single champion.
• Feed it back. Bring what you hear from customers to product, marketing, and operations, and help shape where the company goes next.
• Build the playbook. What you figure out becomes how the rest of the team sells and serves.

What You’ll Need

• A real go-to-market trajectory. Ideally you've grown from SDR through AE or AM, stayed long enough to build something, and performed at the top of your team (President's Club-caliber).
• A track record growing a book of business. You've carried a quota and expanded existing accounts through complex, multi-stakeholder sales.
• Relationships that last. You've built and extended customer relationships over years, not just closed a transaction and moved on.
• Relentless responsiveness. You treat speed as a competitive advantage, not a courtesy.
• Account plans that are real. You understand the business behind a customer's needs and position the work accordingly.
• A clear communicator. Strong in discovery, storytelling, and objection handling, with a clear, persuasive writing style.
• Curiosity about how testing actually works. You pick up technical and scientific concepts fast and turn them into business value for the customer.
• Willing to travel. Regular time on the road at plants, HQs, and industry events.
• Ready to be in the Austin office five days a week, side by side with the founders as we build out the GTM engine.

Especially Relevant Backgrounds

• Selling into manufacturers or raw materials buyers, the same persona our customers are
• Commercial insurance sales (not personal lines or retail), where relationships drive retention
• Any high-service, relationship-driven sales role where the customer expects an answer now

Who We Are

Light Labs is building the modern platform for lab testing, starting with consumer goods brands: cheaper, faster testing that also automates regulatory compliance and drives revenue.

We run ISO 17025 testing for heavy metals, pesticides, glyphosine, PFAS, and more, and we return results in about three days where the industry norm is seven to fourteen. Our Product Insight Panel publishes verified results straight to a brand's product page in about five minutes, and brands that publish have seen conversion lift of around 12%. Hundreds of food and supplement brands already test with us, including AG1, Chomps, David Protein, Serenity Kids, Seed Health, Momentous, Caraway, and Little Spoon.

"Adding the Light Labs Product Insight Panel delivered a strong double-digit lift in conversions and gave shoppers instant confidence." Anthony Gustin, CEO, Equip

Regulation is doing part of the work. California's AB 899 requires heavy-metals testing and public disclosure on baby food, and Prop 65 and Amazon pull the same direction. The category is moving from voluntary to mandatory, and brands that treated testing as optional are now buying it on a deadline. Most of them have never bought testing this way. How it gets sold, serviced, and explained is being decided now, by the people doing it.

We run labs in Ann Arbor, MI and Salt Lake City, UT, with headquarters in Austin, TX. We're backed by 8VC and Valor Equity Partners, with CPG founders and strategics in the round. Everyone here, lab tech to engineer to sales, has a seat at the table in making the food system more transparent.

Our Mission

Everything we consume is getting more toxic and less nutritious, and the problem is invisible. You can't see, taste, or smell it:

• Cinnamon apple puree pouches, marketed for children and labeled preservative-free, kosher, and gluten-free, contained lead levels 200 times greater than the FDA's proposed guidelines.
• Over 1,300 chemicals are banned in cosmetics in the EU, while only 11 are banned in the United States.
• The US allows thousands of food additives that are banned in other countries.
• A study of 168 baby foods found that 95% contained at least one heavy metal (arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium), with a quarter containing all four.
• Seven out of eight samples of kale tested contained disturbing levels of PFAs, with organic kale containing even higher levels of the toxic compounds.

Testing for purity today is slow, expensive, and nearly impossible to interpret without a PhD. No feedback loop means no pressure to change, but if people knew what was actually in their food, they'd shop differently. That's our mission: real transparency, and you'd be the one putting it in front of the brands that can make it happen.

Founding Team

• Nick Mares, 2x founder (Kettle & Fire, a $100M/year brand, and Upside Financing, exited 2022), $60M+ raised, CEO and COO experience, Thiel Fellow.
• Vijay Manohar, helped scale Samsara to $1B ARR and IPO (NYSE: IOT). B.S. computer engineering, UT Austin.

What You Get

• Top-decile salary, plus equity for every employee
• Full health, dental, and vision coverage
• Generous PTO and company holidays
• Direct access to the founders and a seat at the table on how this goes to market

Values We're Looking For

• First Principles. We're looking for team members who can deal with ambiguity, deconstruct problems, and build the optimal solution. Question every requirement, delete any part or process you can, simplify and optimize, accelerate cycle time, automate.
• Standard of Excellence. High standards are contagious. A+ talent attracts A+ talent. There's a glut of mediocrity in the world. We're chasing after the products and people that strive for excellence.
• Bias for Action. Take initiative, make decisions quickly, and have a willingness to experiment and learn from failures. Customer expectations aren't static, they rise over time, which means we have to continuously improve every single day.
• Low Ego. Coachability: it's not about being right, it's about getting to the right answer. React calmly to criticism or negative feedback, treat feedback as an opportunity for information and improvement. Respectfully challenge decisions when you disagree, even when it's uncomfortable, and once a decision is made, commit wholly and move forward.

Why This Role

You'd be taking over relationships with some of the biggest names in CPG, selling a product customers keep buying more of. The average account runs around $250K, and the biggest reach $1–2M+ as brands add products, sites, and testing programs. In an industry this tightly networked, one happy customer tends to introduce you to the next.

Light Labs is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic.