Strategic Account Executive

About this role

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