Founding Account Executive

Job description

About FirstPrinciples FirstPrinciples is a research company building AI for scientific discovery. It began with Theo, the AI Physicist, and has since grown into a product-focused company with two additional systems including Theo Conjecture, built for automated conjecturing, and Theo Collaborator, an adaptive environment for doing complex research with AI. We're a fast-growing, remote-first team of builders, researchers, engineers, and thinkers working across Canada, the US, the UK, and expanding globally. What brings us together is a shared curiosity about how the universe works, and a belief that we can build systems that help us explore it more effectively. We spend our time working on questions that don't have clear answers, like how to design AI that can reason through scientific problems, and how the scientific process as a whole might evolve. This is work that sits somewhere between creativity and rigorous thinking, and often requires comfort with ambiguity and iteration. If you're someone who enjoys tackling big, abstract problems and exploring ideas that don't yet have a defined path forward, you'll likely find the work here interesting. Why This Role Exists: We’re building products to accelerate progress in physics - but that only matters if the right researchers discover them, understand how they work, and make the decision to adopt them. Besides building the technology, the challenge is earning the trust of researchers and institutions, and translating it into active usage and commercial relationships. This role exists to lead that journey. You’ll work across the full sales lifecycle: from identifying and reaching out to researchers and organizations, to discovery, demos, evaluations, and close. You’ll help prospective users move from curiosity, to confidence that the platform can advance their research. Your impact will directly shape who we serve, how we bring the product to market, and how quickly we build a repeatable path to adoption and revenue. What You’ll Do: - Build relationships and pipeline across commercial R&D teams, industry researchers, research groups, national laboratories, and other personas - Own the end-to-end commercial lifecycle: from prospecting and qualification, to discovery, demos, proposals, and close - Conduct thoughtful, targeted outreach to physicists and research leaders, grounded in an understanding of their work and potential needs - Run technically credible discovery conversations and product demos that connect researchers’ goals to concrete product use cases - Help prospective customers structure pilot plans, establish success criteria, and build confidence in adopting the platform - Navigate multiple stakeholders across scientific, technical, administrative, procurement, and leadership functions - Build lightweight systems for outreach, qualification, account planning, CRM management, follow-up, and forecasting that can scale with the organization - Work closely with Research Partners to create a strong handoff from commercial agreement to onboarding, successful usage, and long-term adoption - Bring market feedback, objections, and emerging use cases back to product, research, and engineering - Own clear pipeline, conversion, and revenue goals while helping define our early sales playbook Who You Are: - Strong background in physics or a closely related scientific field (A background in physics, or a related scientific field) - Genuinely interested in commercial work and motivated by helping scientific products reach the researchers who can benefit from them - Comfortable initiating conversations, prospecting into new organizations, and building relationships from the ground up - Able to understand complex research goals and translate technical capabilities into clear, credible value - Experience in consultative sales, business development, scientific partnerships, solutions consulting, research commercialization, or a similarly customer-facing role - Strong communicator who can lead discovery conversations, present compelling demonstrations, and move opportunities toward a decision - Persistent and highly organized, you follow through, maintain momentum, and are comfortable being accountable for measurable commercial outcomes What You’ll Get: - The opportunity to work on foundational problems at the intersection of AI and physics - A high-trust, low-bureaucracy environment with real ownership - Remote-first work with flexibility in how you structure your day - Exposure to cutting-edge ideas across AI, scientific discovery, and emerging technologies - A culture that values curiosity, depth of thinking, and first-principles reasoning - The chance to contribute to work aimed at advancing fundamental science