Founding Account Executive - Simulation Agent
About the Role
This is a founding sales hire at an early-stage AI software company building intelligent agents for hardware engineering workflows - spanning simulation, CAD, and PLM. You'll own the full new-logo sales motion from day one, converting both warm founder-sourced opportunities and self-generated pipeline into closed deals, while creating the playbook that future sellers will run.
What You'll Do
Own the complete sales cycle - outbound prospecting, discovery, technical evaluation, procurement navigation, and close - for net-new enterprise accounts.
Run unaided product demos and design technical evaluations inside customer models and workflows, translating results into business value without SE support.
Navigate complex, multi-stakeholder buying committees, bridging CAE/simulation champions to VP/Director-level economic buyers.
Build and execute target account plans against teams currently using tools such as ANSYS, SIMULIA, Altair, or Simcenter.
Develop qualification criteria, discovery frameworks, evaluation templates, and objection-handling guides that form the company's go-to-market playbook.
Feed structured learnings back to product to sharpen the agent and future sales motions.
Build repeatable processes and documentation for the sales organization you'll help grow.
What We're Looking For
6+ years of full-cycle, outbound-led B2B sales into engineering or manufacturing organizations, with a verifiable record of sourcing and closing net-new logos against quota.
Proven ability to run unaided software demos and real technical evaluations with engineering teams - no reliance on a dedicated SE in the room.
Direct experience selling into CAE/Simulation environments (ANSYS, SIMULIA, Altair, Siemens Simcenter, or equivalents) as a vendor rep, reseller, or competitor.
Background selling CAD/CAE/PLM/EDA or adjacent deep-tech (dev tools, MLOps, infrastructure) into large enterprises; strong domain fluency is valued over formal engineering credentials.
Fluency with AI agents and LLMs, with the ability to articulate practical agentic workflows and translate capabilities into concrete engineering value.
Founding-hire mindset: comfortable building a motion from scratch, owning ambiguous work, and operating without an established playbook.
Prior experience as an early or founding sales hire is a strong plus.
Location
On-site in San Francisco, CA. Visa sponsorship is not available.