Account Executive

FirstPrinciples

$100K — $120K *
US-Anywhere
+ 2 other locationsRemote
Business Services
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of experience in consultative sales or technical sales in scientific fields
  • Strong background in physics or closely related scientific discipline
  • Ability to understand and articulate complex scientific concepts
  • Proven track record in building relationships with influencers and stakeholders
  • Exceptional communication skills, able to lead presentations and discussions
  • Highly organized and persistent in maintaining workflows and follow-ups

Responsibilities

  • Build the commercial function, refining messaging and sales processes based on market insights
  • Develop relationships with commercial R&D teams and researchers
  • Manage the entire sales lifecycle from prospecting to closing deals
  • Conduct targeted outreach to physicists based on their specific research needs
  • Facilitate product demonstrations that align with researchers' objectives
  • Create pilot plans and success criteria to instill confidence in product adoption
  • Collaborate with stakeholders in various functions to ensure successful integration and usage

Benefits

  • Opportunity to work on pioneering problems at the intersection of AI and physics
  • Low-bureaucracy environment that fosters ownership and initiative
  • Flexible work structure in a remote-first setup
  • Access to cutting-edge advancements in AI and scientific research
  • Culture that encourages curiosity and critical thinking
  • Contribute to significant advancements in fundamental scientific research
Full Job Description
Why This Role Exists:

We're building products to accelerate progress in physics - but that only matters if the right researchers discover them, understand how they work, and make the decision to adopt them. Besides building the technology, the challenge is earning the trust of researchers and institutions, and translating it into active usage and commercial relationships.

This role exists to lead that journey. You'll work across the full sales lifecycle: from identifying and reaching out to researchers and organizations, to discovery, demos, evaluations, and close. You'll help prospective users move from curiosity, to confidence that the platform can advance their research.

Your impact will directly shape who we serve, how we bring the product to market, and how quickly we build a repeatable path to adoption and revenue.

What You'll Do:
  • Help build the commercial function from the ground up, continuously testing and refining our ICP, messaging, sales process, and go-to-market motion based on what you learn in the market
  • Build relationships and pipeline across commercial R&D teams, industry researchers, research groups, national laboratories, and other personas
  • Own the end-to-end commercial lifecycle: from prospecting and qualification, to discovery, demos, proposals, and close
  • Conduct thoughtful, targeted outreach to physicists and research leaders, grounded in an understanding of their work and potential needs
  • Run technically credible discovery conversations and product demos that connect researchers' goals to concrete product use cases
  • Help prospective customers structure pilot plans, establish success criteria, and build confidence in adopting the platform
  • Navigate multiple stakeholders across scientific, technical, administrative, procurement, and leadership functions
  • Build lightweight systems for outreach, qualification, account planning, CRM management, follow-up, and forecasting that can scale with the organization
  • Work closely with Research Partners to create a strong handoff from commercial agreement to onboarding, successful usage, and long-term adoption
  • Bring market feedback, objections, and emerging use cases back to product, research, and engineering
  • Own clear pipeline, conversion, and revenue goals while helping define our early sales playbook


Who You Are:
  • Energized by the ambiguity of an early commercial function - you're as comfortable figuring out how we should sell as you are working through the sale itself
  • Strong background in physics or a closely related scientific field (A background in physics, or a related scientific field)
  • Genuinely interested in commercial work and motivated by helping scientific products reach the researchers who can benefit from them
  • Comfortable initiating conversations, prospecting into new organizations, and building relationships from the ground up
  • Able to understand complex research goals and translate technical capabilities into clear, credible value
  • Experience in consultative sales, business development, scientific partnerships, solutions consulting, research commercialization, or a similarly customer-facing role
  • Strong communicator who can lead discovery conversations, present compelling demonstrations, and move opportunities toward a decision
  • Persistent and highly organized, you follow through, maintain momentum, and are comfortable being accountable for measurable commercial outcomes


What You'll Get:
  • The opportunity to work on foundational problems at the intersection of AI and physics
  • A high-trust, low-bureaucracy environment with real ownership
  • Remote-first work with flexibility in how you structure your day
  • Exposure to cutting-edge ideas across AI, scientific discovery, and emerging technologies
  • A culture that values curiosity, depth of thinking, and first-principles reasoning
  • The chance to contribute to work aimed at advancing fundamental science

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