Strategic Account Executive

Job description

As a Strategic Account Executive at FriendliAI, you will be instrumental in driving our market expansion by securing high-value enterprise accounts and building strategic relationships with leading AI-forward companies. You'll focus on helping enterprises leverage FriendliAI's inference serving platform to achieve transformative cost savings and performance improvements across their AI deployments. **Environments** - Highly competitive base salary plus uncapped commission structure tied to enterprise deal value - Equity in a rapidly growing AI infrastructure company - Comprehensive benefits package - Collaborative environment with exposure to cutting-edge AI technologies **Key Responsibilities** - Own the end-to-end sales process with enterprises, from generating pipeline to closing high-value, strategic enterprise deals focused on AI inference and serving solutions - Identify and capitalize on growth opportunities within existing accounts, becoming a trusted advisor for AI infrastructure optimization - Build and maintain strategic relationships with CTOs, engineering leaders, ML/AI leaders, and other technical decision-makers at target enterprises. - Manage technical POCs that demonstrate FriendliAI's superior performance and cost advantages, collaborating with internal engineering teams and enterprise clients - Consistently generate and manage a robust pipeline by identifying enterprises with significant inference workloads and positioning FriendliAI's solutions strategically - Lead tech community engagements, representing FriendliAI at premier AI/ML conferences, meetups, and industry events (AI Engineer World's Fair, AWS re:Invent, etc.) - Cultivate strategic relationships with AI engineers, ML platform leaders, and technical decision-makers at target enterprises through community involvement - Organize technical events; workshops, technical demos, and meetups showcasing FriendliAI - Collaborate on technical content, case studies, and speaking opportunities that establish FriendliAI's market leadership - Bring the voice of enterprise customers into product discussions, ensuring FriendliAI's roadmap aligns with market needs and competitive positioning - Work closely with engineering teams to understand and articulate complex technical differentiators around inference optimization - Analyze the competitive landscape and provide insights on enterprise AI infrastructure trends and requirements **Qualifications** - 5+ years of B2B enterprise sales experience - Proven track record of closing $300K+ ARR deals and consistently exceeding revenue targets - Experience selling AI inference, GPU compute, cloud infrastructure, bare-metal infrastructure, or other technical AI infrastructure solutions - Strong technical background in AI/ML infrastructure, cloud platforms, compute, or developer tools - Deep understanding of LLM deployment, inference serving, and AI/ML workflows - Active participation in AI/ML tech communities with demonstrated networking abilities - Experience managing technical POCs and multi-stakeholder enterprise sales cycles - Excellent communication skills for engaging both C-level executives and technical teams **Preferred Experience** - AI inference, AI infrastructure, MLOps, cloud compute, bare-metal infrastructure, or developer tools company background - Existing network within enterprise AI/ML, engineering, or infrastructure teams - Technical degree or equivalent practical experience in AI/ML space - Track record of organizing or speaking at tech meetups and industry conferences **About us** FriendliAI, a San Mateo, CA-based startup, is building the next-generation AI inference platform that accelerates the deployment of large language and multimodal models with unmatched performance and efficiency. Our infrastructure supports high-throughput, low-latency AI workloads for organizations worldwide. We are also integrated with the Hugging Face platform, allowing instant access to over 600,000 open-source models. We are on a mission to deliver the world's best platform for AI inference