Sales Director

Job description

Frontline work keeps the world running. Restaurants, hospitals, schools, nurseries, airlines, stores, emergency services. Together they employ 80% of the global workforce, over 3 billion people, and they're among the hardest businesses anywhere to run. By-the-minute scheduling, HR and payroll make them far more operationally complex than the average office, yet just 1% of venture funding has ever gone to software built for them. Rising costs, wage increases, labour shortages and tighter regulation have made fixing that urgent. Sona is the AI-native workforce management platform for frontline organisations, with agents that match staffing to real demand and take the admin load off managers. That's a $500bn+ market the software industry has mostly walked past. We've raised over $100M from N47, Felicis, Gradient and Northzone, signed more than 100 enterprise customers across the UK and US, and opened offices in London, New York, Austin and Lisbon. More on working at Sona here https://www.sona.ai/careers. About the Role At Sona, we're selling into a market that has been underserved for decades, and the momentum is real. As our Sales Director, you'll build and lead the AE team that turns that momentum into repeatable, scalable revenue. If you want to inherit a finished playbook, this isn't the role. This is a build. You'll take strong foundations, a product customers genuinely need and a growing pipeline, and shape how we generate demand, run deals, and coach reps to win. You'll report to Nathan, our VP of Sales, and work hand in hand with marketing, product, and the customer team to keep the whole motion tight. Responsibilities - Lead, coach, and develop the AE team, setting the standard for how we sell and how we win - Own pipeline generation as a core discipline and build the outbound engine that feeds sustainable growth - Bring sales rigour to how the team qualifies, runs, and closes complex, multi-stakeholder, multi-threaded deals - Get into the detail of live deals - the champion, the business value, the competition, and where the next push needs to come from - Set the operational rhythm of the team: pipeline reviews, forecasting, hiring, and coaching cadences - Own how the team is built, hiring high-quality reps and raising the bar as we scale - Partner with marketing on demand generation, and with product and customer teams to keep the sales motion sharp - Bring AI-first thinking to how the team sells, using AI tools to improve prospecting, deal intelligence, and rep productivity Requirements - You've built or significantly scaled an AE team before, not just run one that was already established - You've worked in a environment with high targets and high performance expectations - You've built pipeline generation engines that worked, and you can talk honestly about the ones that didn't - You're a genuine coach: the reps who worked for you left better than they arrived - You bring real operational rigour, structuring your weeks and months to execute rather than react - You've worked in a high-growth start-up or scale-up and know what it means to build without a safety net - You're genuinely curious about customers and the frontline market, and that curiosity shows in how you sell - Bonus: experience selling into frontline sectors (social care, hospitality, retail), or a background in workforce management, HR tech, or adjacent enterprise SaaS Benefits - Salary: £120,000 - £150,000 base, double OTE (£240,000 - £300,000 on-target earnings) - Hybrid: Based in our London office (min 3 days a week), with regular travel to customers and prospects across the UK - Share options - 35 days annual leave (25 days standard plus 10 flexible public holiday days) - Extra day of leave for every year of service - Pension contributions matched up to 5% - Comprehensive health insurance - Enhanced parental leave & pay - Workplace nursery scheme - Annual all expenses paid team retreats - The latest Macbook and equipment budget for your home office - Professional development budget - Unlimited free books Note: this represents a typical benefits package for a UK-based, full-time employee. Exact details may vary based on location and employment type but we try to be as fair as possible to all of our team members. Please ask your contact in the Talent team to clarify the available benefits for you.