Founding Account Executive (f/m/x)

Cologne, Germany (Hybrid)

Team: Sales · Format: Full-time, permanent

Build our pipeline from the first call

ilert is the alerting, on-call and incident response platform that engineering teams worldwide rely on when things break. That covers alerting, on-call scheduling, call routing, status pages, and an AI SRE that investigates incidents alongside the people responding to them.

We're bootstrapped, profitable, and small. Now we're hiring our first Account Executive to win new mid-market customers in DACH and across Europe.

This is an outbound role. There's no SDR team and no inbound lead queue to work from. Every opportunity in your pipeline is one you found, opened and closed yourself.

The timing is good. Atlassian is retiring Opsgenie, so a lot of teams in our market are choosing a new incident management tool right now.

Tasks

• Build your own pipeline. Pick the accounts, research them, and start conversations with Heads of IT Operations, platform and SRE leads, and CTOs. Email, phone, LinkedIn, events, referrals: use whatever works, and measure it.
• Run the full sales cycle. Discovery, demo, trial, security questions, negotiation and signature. You own every deal from first contact to close.
• Sell to technical buyers. Learn the product well enough to run a credible demo for an SRE, and know when to bring in an engineer.
• Write the playbook. As our first AE, you work out which segments, messages and channels work, write it down, and set it up for the sellers who come after you.
• Bring the market back in. Tell product and marketing what prospects ask for, why we win and why we lose.
• Keep the numbers honest. Keep your pipeline and forecast up to date in HubSpot.

What you bring

• 3+ years as a closing Account Executive in B2B SaaS. Quota-carrying, new business. SDR years are a great start, but they don't count toward this.
• Pipeline you built yourself. You can point to deals you sourced through outbound and closed, not only inbound leads you converted.
• Mid-market deals. Several stakeholders, a technical evaluator and a budget owner, closed in weeks to a few months.
• SaaS sold as a product. Subscription software, not services, consulting or custom development.
• Experience selling to technical buyers. Ideally DevOps, SRE, IT Operations or engineering teams.
• Thoughtful outbound. You research before you reach out, you use modern tools (AI included) to do it faster, and you'd rather send 30 well-researched emails than 300 generic ones.
• Comfortable building from zero. No playbook, no SDR, no sales ops. That sounds like an opportunity to you.
• Business-fluent German and English. You'll sell in both.
• Able to be in our Cologne office 3 days a week.

Bonus

• You've sold monitoring, observability, ITSM, developer tools or cloud infrastructure
• You were an early or first sales hire at a SaaS startup
• You know the incident management market: PagerDuty, Opsgenie, incident.io and others
• You can run a technical demo yourself
• HubSpot experience

Benefits

• Build It Your Way: As our first AE, you design the outbound motion and help shape the sales team that grows from it.
• A Product Teams Need: Every company that runs 24/7 services needs alerting and on-call. You sell something teams rely on every day, not a nice-to-have.
• Something New to Sell: An AI SRE that investigates real incidents for real customers, on top of a proven alerting and on-call platform.
• Hybrid Freedom: Our office in Cologne Rheinauhafen with a roof terrace (3 days/week), plus work from home on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
• Independent and Stable: Bootstrapped and profitable. We build for customers, not for the next funding round.

How to apply

No cover letter needed. Send your CV along with:

• One deal you sourced yourself and closed: how you found it, who the buyer was, roughly how big it was and how long it took.
• One company you'd go after first for ilert, and how you'd open the conversation.

If you'd rather build a pipeline than wait for one, we want to talk to you.

Keywords: Account Executive, Founding Account Executive, B2B SaaS Sales, New Business, Outbound, Mid-Market, DACH, Vertrieb, Köln.