{"id":2489327,"url":"https://alion.io/job/openvpn-founding-head-of-gtm-cipherscale","title":"Founding Head of GTM - Cipherscale","company":{"id":680706,"name":"OpenVPN","domain":"openvpn.net","url":"https://alion.io/company/openvpn","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Recruitee","truth_index":null},"role":"Sales","role_family":"Sales","seniority":"head","employment_type":"contractor","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"posting_text","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":["London, United Kingdom"],"countries":["GB"],"hiring_countries":["DE","PL","ES"],"hiring_countries_total":3,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":83000,"max_usd":195000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":14},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Zero Trust","optional":false},{"name":"Least Privilege","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-16T11:49:25Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-16","last_verified_at":"2026-11-05T15:19:21Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":50,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":50},"description":"The Opportunity: Zero-to-one category creation for AI-Native Zero Trust Access\nCipherscale is building an AI-native Zero Trust access and enforcement plane for humans, software/workloads, and AI agents.\nThe product doctrine is simple: AI may reason and propose; deterministic policy authorizes; trusted enforcement executes.\nWe are looking for a commercial founder/operator who can turn that architecture into a category, a repeatable customer problem, real deployments, and initial revenue.\nMission: discover and prove the repeatable commercial truth for Cipherscale - who urgently needs it, what gets them to deploy, what makes them pay, and what causes them to expand.\nWhat You Own\nOwn ICP discovery, exclusion criteria, buyer/champion mapping, problem validation, positioning, initial wedge, and design-partner recruitment.\nPersonally lead early customer discovery, technical/commercial conversations, executive outreach, design-partner conversion, and initial closing.\nBuild an evidence-driven GTM system: every important assumption has supporting/contradicting evidence and a next falsification test.\nUse AI agents aggressively for research, account intelligence, personalization, competitive monitoring, meeting preparation, call synthesis, content, and experiment analysis.\nWork directly with the CEO on category creation and major strategic accounts.\nWork with Product and Engineering to convert recurring customer evidence into governed product inputs - without turning prospect anecdotes into roadmap commitments.\nDefine the first repeatable acquisition, deployment, conversion, and expansion motion before scaling a team.\nWhat This Role Is Not\nIt is not a traditional marketing leadership job.\nIt is not an MQL, impressions, content-calendar, or brand-campaign role.\nIt is not a decision to hire SDR, demand-gen, content, and marketing-ops teams before product-market evidence exists.\nIt is not ownership of OpenVPN growth. Rod, Head of Growth, owns the established-business growth mandate;\nThis role is focused on Cipherscale zero-to-one GTM and must collaborate cleanly without duplicating authority.\nImportant:\nThis is a full-time remote job, and it will be a long-termB2B contract.\n\nThis can be a permanent employment opportunity for candidates based in Spain, Poland, and Germany.\n\nOur philosophy is that we are a small, close-knit team, and we care deeply about you:\nHighly competitive salary + Bonus\n\nFully remote work environments.\n\nSelf-managed time off.\n\nRequirements\nWho We Want\nYou have personally helped take a deeply technical B2B security, infrastructure, identity, developer, cloud, or AI\nproduct from near-zero to repeatable initial revenue.\nYou can sit with a CISO, CTO, security architect, platform engineer, and AI-platform leader and earn credibility.\nYou understand enough security architecture to reason about identity, delegated authority, credentials, policy,\nenforcement, trust boundaries, auditability, and blast radius.\nYou are comfortable selling before there is a polished playbook and learning directly from rejection.\nYou treat AI as operating leverage. Your instinct is to build agentic workflows before asking for headcount.\nYou are analytical enough to distinguish activity from evidence and evidence from causality.\nYou are comfortable challenging the CEO and product assumptions when customer evidence disagrees.\nStrong Background Signals\nEarly-stage Zero Trust, identity, cloud security, developer security, infrastructure security, AI security, developer infrastructure, or adjacent enterprise-security categories.\nFounder, first-GTM, product-led commercial operator, technical seller, or hands-on GTM executive backgrounds can all fit.\nLarge-company titles alone are not compelling.\nAnti-Profile\nYour first answer to a growth problem is \"hire a team.\"\nYou depend on agencies for core positioning or customer discovery.\nYou optimize lead volume before proving deployment and retention.\nYou cannot personally run technical discovery or executive selling.\nYou treat AI as a copywriting assistant rather than an operating system.\nYou blur probabilistic AI recommendations with authorization or security enforcement.\nFirst 90 Days: Window Expected outcome\n\n0-30 days: 10-15 qualified ICP conversations; ~5 credible design-partner candidates; evidence-backed recommendation on ICP, problem, buyer, positioning, and wedge.\n31-60 days: Convert the strongest partners into real or production-like deployments; measure time-to-value, blockers, security objections, and willingness to pay.\n\n61-90 days: Target 5+ production or production-intent deployments where product readiness permits; first paying customers; prove or disprove repeatability with a second cohort; document the acquisition/onboarding motion.\nHow Success Is Measured\n\nBusiness: paid customers, initial ARR/MRR, expansion and eventually defensible unit economics.\nCustomer: time-to-first-value, production activation, repeated authorized usage, protected resources/principals,\nretention and expansion.\nFunnel: qualified conversations -> design partners -> deployments -> production -> paid -> expansion.\nLearning velocity: experiment cycle time, evidence quality, speed at which weak assumptions are killed or corrected.\nOperating Model and Reporting\nThis role works directly with the CEO during zero-to-one discovery and partners closely with Rod, Head of Growth.\nDecision rights will be explicit: CipherScale market discovery cannot become an overlapping second growth\norganization, and OpenVPN growth priorities cannot dilute CipherScale category discovery. As the motion becomes\nrepeatable, responsibilities can be consolidated based on evidence rather than titles.\nSecurity Expectations\nYou will operate with customer and prospect data, AI agents, email/CRM systems, call transcripts, and potentially\ntechnical environments. Treat agents as potentially compromised actors. Use scoped identities, least privilege,\ndeterministic authorization for external actions, credential isolation, customer-data boundaries, prompt-injection\ndefenses, audit trails, and human approval for high-impact commitments until explicitly delegated.\nCompensation Philosophy\nWe would rather pay exceptional compensation and meaningful upside for one outstanding founder-level operator\nthan assemble a large conventional GTM organization. Final structure should reflect experience, location, scope, and\ndemonstrated ability to create zero-to-one enterprise value.\nThe Test\nA strong candidate should be able to take the Cipherscale thesis, identify the first market to attack, design the first ten\ncustomer experiments, explain what evidence would invalidate the strategy, and show how they would use AI to\nexecute the work with minimal human headcount.","description_format":"text","description_chars":6741,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"Germany","iso":"DE","kind":"country"},{"name":"Poland","iso":"PL","kind":"country"},{"name":"Spain","iso":"ES","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Information Security"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-14T01:36:46Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":30,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.678,"p_room":0.45,"age_days":49,"expected_fill_days":30,"reasons":["conf:4","win:tail"],"computed_at":"2026-11-05T05:54:30Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/openvpn-founding-head-of-gtm-cipherscale","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/openvpn-founding-head-of-gtm-cipherscale.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-05T20:23:10Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":27678,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-06T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":680706},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=680706"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fopenvpn-founding-head-of-gtm-cipherscale"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fopenvpn-founding-head-of-gtm-cipherscale"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fopenvpn-founding-head-of-gtm-cipherscale"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/openvpn-founding-head-of-gtm-cipherscale\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fopenvpn-founding-head-of-gtm-cipherscale"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":2489327}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"openvpn.net","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":2489327},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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