AI Native Sales Manager

Fireworks AI

$150K — $180K *
Consumer Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of sales or business development experience with technical buyers
  • Proven record of account growth in technical, infrastructure, or AI markets
  • Strong coaching skills for sales processes and technical discussions
  • Experience in fast-paced startup or high-growth environments
  • Technical understanding of topics like open-source inference and API performance
  • Analytical skills to diagnose sales performance using metrics
  • Excellent verbal and written communication abilities

Responsibilities

  • Lead and develop a team of AI Native Account Executives targeting GenAI startups
  • Achieve performance goals for new logos and consumption growth
  • Refine sales processes from initial contact to production
  • Coach AEs on effective technical engagement with clients
  • Collaborate with cross-functional teams to facilitate adoption and solutions
  • Establish operating rhythms for pipeline and deal management
  • Utilize account data to spot expansion opportunities and address issues
  • Represent the company at industry events and enhance team visibility

Benefits

  • Opportunity to lead a high-impact team
  • Work within a fast-growing segment of the AI industry
  • Hands-on leadership role with direct involvement in deals
  • Collaboration with multiple departments for holistic growth
  • Culture focused on continuous learning and improvement
Full Job Description
About the Role

We're looking for an AI Native Sales Manager to build, coach, and scale the team selling into the most ambitious GenAI-native companies in the world. This person will lead a team of AI Native Account Executives, own new business and expansion across a portfolio of GenAI startups, and build the repeatable playbooks that turn early technical traction into production-scale revenue.

Fireworks is past $1B ARR and trusted by GenAI-native companies like Cursor, Vercel, and Genspark. The AI Native segment moves faster than any other part of our business - founders evaluate in days, workloads scale in weeks, and the buyer is almost always technical. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who can both set strategy and get in the deal. You'll be expected to raise the bar on technical credibility, discovery rigor, usage growth, and forecast accuracy, while creating an environment where AEs learn quickly and grow into future GTM leaders.
What You'll Do
  • Lead, coach, and develop a team of AI Native Account Executives selling into GenAI-native startups.
  • Own team performance against new logo, consumption growth, pipeline, and forecast accuracy goals.
  • Build and refine the AI Native sales motion - from first technical conversation through evaluation, benchmarking, POC, and production scale.
  • Coach AEs to lead credible technical conversations with founders, ML engineers, and infra leads, and to earn trust with both engineers and founders.
  • Partner with GTM engineering, product, and applied AI to unblock adoption, shape tailored solutions, and accelerate time to value in your team's accounts.
  • Partner with Sales Development, Marketing, and RevOps on target accounts, territories, qualification standards, inbound routing, and funnel conversion.
  • Establish clear operating rhythms, including pipeline reviews, deal reviews, call reviews, coaching sessions, and weekly forecast inspection.
  • Use usage and account health data to identify expansion opportunities, diagnose churn or stalled adoption, and prioritize the highest-impact accounts.
  • Translate patterns across the segment into actionable product and roadmap feedback.
  • Hire, onboard, and ramp new AEs as the team scales.
  • Represent Fireworks in the GenAI ecosystem - demo days, meetups, and online communities - and build the team's presence there.
  • Create a culture of accountability, curiosity, technical depth, and continuous improvement.
What we're looking for
  • 5+ years of experience in sales or business development selling to technical buyers, with experience managing or formally coaching quota-carrying AEs.
  • Proven ability to win and grow accounts in a technical, infrastructure, AI, or developer-oriented market - especially consumption or usage-based models.
  • Strong coaching skills, especially around technical discovery, multi-threading, POC and evaluation management, negotiation, and executive communication.
  • Comfort operating in an early-stage or high-growth environment where playbooks are still being built.
  • Ability to understand and explain technical topics like open-source inference, API performance, model tuning, or GPU architecture - and to hold your own with a founder or ML lead.
  • Strong analytical orientation and ability to use pipeline and consumption metrics to diagnose performance and improve team execution.
  • Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
  • High standards for talent, process, and operational rigor.
  • Ability to partner cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, Applied ML, Marketing, RevOps, and Recruiting.
  • Genuine enthusiasm for working with startup founders and builders on the front lines of the GenAI movement.
Nice to Have
  • Experience selling into engineering leaders, product leaders, founders, or AI/ML teams.
  • Experience supporting AI-native, developer-tooling, data infrastructure, cloud, or open-source GTM motions.
  • Prior experience building a sales team or segment from an early stage.
  • Background in a technical or product role before moving into sales leadership.
  • Familiarity with tools such as Salesforce, Gong, Lemlist, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Clay, or similar revenue platforms.
What Success Looks Like
  • The team consistently lands and grows GenAI-native accounts aligned to Fireworks' priority segments.
  • AEs are technically credible, run rigorous evaluations and POCs, and shorten time from first conversation to production workload.
  • Consumption in existing accounts grows predictably, with expansion identified from usage data rather than guesswork.
  • Forecasts are accurate, pipeline is well-inspected, and the operating rhythm is clear to everyone on the team.
  • New AEs ramp quickly and understand both the technical context and commercial value of Fireworks.
  • Feedback from the segment reliably reaches product and engineering and shapes what we build.
Location

San Mateo, CA / San Francisco, CA

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