Director of Sales

Operant AI is seeking a results-oriented Director of Sales to join the Operant AI team as a foundational member of the GTM team, focused on North America. Operant is enjoying a period of rapid growth, with huge opportunities for sales leaders who thrive off of urgency and meeting critical customer needs in a face-paced startup environment.

As the right candidate to join us on this roller-coaster, you are a hands-on do-er who thrives off of the energy of closing deals and growing contracts, while building foundations for rapid scaling in a high-growth startup environment. You are a seasoned cyber expert with deep industry knowledge spanning tech and buying processes, able to cultivate the right relationships with the right people across customer orgs to drive successful closing and account user growth. Your technical prowess at understanding the urgent security challenges and available market solutions at the cutting edge of cloud and AI, including CNAPPs, API Security, AppSec, K8s Sec, and MCP, should enable you to comfortably discuss Operant’s product details, features, and differentiation with key technical members of customer teams, including CISOs, Directors of AppSec and CloudSec, VPs of Eng, security engineers and SREs, building trust and brand equity as you represent the company in growing our customer relationships through successful POCs and signed revenue contracts. You should deeply understand the cloud and AI cybersecurity competitive landscape (both incumbents and rising startups) and should be passionate about Operant’s mission to secure the modern world. You'll be responsible for driving new business acquisition and expanding existing accounts within our aggressive pipeline, and you will be working with a close-knit team of fellow passionate experts across sales, marketing, and eng along the way.

Who We Are:

We’re in business to secure the modern world. Operant’s unique technology solves several of the biggest problems in modern cybersecurity - including several critical use cases in securing Gen AI applications - with an implementation that is so easy that many customers don’t believe that it could possibly be true until they see it in action. As a leader in the AI and MCP security space, we have already been named as a vendor in four Gartner reports in the last year, including the iconic Market Guide for AI Trust, Risk, and Security Management (AI TRiSM), How to Secure Custom-Built Agents, Gartner’s market guide for API Protection and Kubernetes Runtime Security as well as Forrester’s Zero Trust landscape.

Key Responsibilities:

1. Drive Revenue Growth:

Convert trial POCs into paid revenue contracts by working closely with customers, engineering and customer success teams throughout the entire sales cycle.

Identify key accounts and establish strong relationships with C-level executives, decision-makers, and users, being able to build trust with deeply technical buyers to close sales with a product that instantly meets their urgent needs.

Develop and manage sales pipelines, forecasts, and budgets.

2. Collaborate Cross-Functionally:

Work closely with marketing, product, and engineering teams to align sales efforts with overall company objectives.

Provide insights and feedback to product and marketing teams to enhance product offerings and messaging.

Represent the brand at key live events including conferences, customer dinners, and industry talks.

3. Analyze and Report on Sales Performance:

Track and analyze sales metrics and performance data.

Prepare and present regular sales reports to the executive team.

Utilize data-driven insights to continuously improve sales strategies and processes.

4. Build and Lead a High-Performing Sales Team:

Recruit, train, and mentor a “best-in-class” team of sales engineers and account executives, without relying on SDRs to manage your communication pipeline.

Set clear performance goals, provide regular feedback, and drive accountability.

Foster a positive, collaborative, respectful and results-oriented sales culture.

5. Own Next-Level Sales Strategy:

Develop and implement a comprehensive sales strategy that doesn’t rely on cold emails and armies of SDRs.

Qualifications:

• 8+ years of experience with growing responsibility in related roles with a strong track record of success in a startup environment.
• Cybersecurity experience required.
• Proven track record of success in a startup sales leadership role, in enterprise cybersecurity, especially cloud, Kubernetes or AI.
• Personal experience driving the customer conversion lifecycle from inbound through POC and closing to revenue contracts with a clear, proven track record of building and driving relationships across buyers, users, and champions, as well as driving sales process paperwork in a rapidly moving, accelerated time frame.
• Experience leading and scaling sales teams in a Series A or similar high-growth environment with an emphasis on owning and growing key customer relationships throughout the sales cycle.
• Exceptionally good technical prowess in cloud, AI and kubernetes with a proven track record of selling at the cutting edge of technology, including the ability to self-teach technical concepts at a level of detail required to hold authority and build trust with highly technical buyers, as well as quick absorption of new technical principles and shifting competitors in a rapidly changing market segment.
• Strong understanding of sales processes, CRM systems, and sales enablement tools.
• Comfort with and passion for cross-functional relationship building across multiple members of customer teams, internal stakeholders, and vendors.
• Deep respect for the customer’s intelligence, their real-world needs, and our product’s ability to genuinely make customers’ lives easier and their stacks more secure.
• Exceptional written and spoken communication skills with impeccable social judgment and the ability to customize your communications to the situation while remaining true to the product and brand messaging.
• Experience working in a fast-paced startup environment.
• Open, curious and receptive to new ideas and ways of doing things.
• Willing to mentor new members of the team as the company grows.
• Bachelor's degree with demonstrated comfort with both human behavior and technical topics either through coursework, extension classes or prior work experience.
• SF Bay Area location for hybrid set-up in our Jackson Square office is strongly preferred.
• Remote candidates from the US and Canada will be considered.
• This position will require you to be available during core PST business hours (9am-5pm) and to be highly responsive on customer threads regardless of business hours. You will be required to adjust schedules based on customer and business needs including business travel, conferences, client meeting/call schedules, and team off-sites.

What you can expect from us:

Operant is an equal opportunity workplace where you will find an open and supportive environment to share your thoughts and ideas, while enabling you to springboard your career in a high-growth, high-energy startup.

• Medical, dental and vision insurance
• Life insurance
• 401k
• Paid holidays
• Generous PTO
• Stock options

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