Strategic Account Executive

The opportunity

Aiven is putting its first sales seat on the ground in the Bay Area, working exclusively with Digital Natives.

The AI-native companies being built here are choosing their data infrastructure now, that means the event backbone their agents and pipelines run on, the analytics store their traces and evaluations land in, the Postgres that becomes their system of record, the index behind retrieval. This seat is designed to be where those companies are today: early, engineering-led, moving fast, and about to make decisions they will live with for years.

You'll be in the room when those decisions get made and stay in it as they scale. That is what partnership means at this stage, and it is why the outcome you sell is not a database.

It is a product that ships sooner because the team builds features instead of running infrastructure. A first workload in production in days, through the Terraform provider and a Marketplace private offer, not a procurement cycle. A cost line that scales with usage rather than with the platform team they would otherwise have to hire. And a data layer built on open source, on every major cloud or in their own account, so the first enterprise customer's compliance questions and the next round's growth don't force a re-platform. Your job is to be first, and to turn usage into durable commercial relationships.
The Role:

You will drive strategic growth by acquiring new Aiven customers and expanding relationships.
This is a high-impact, quota-carrying role focused on new logo acquisition, growing usage over baseline, and increasing customer commitments in one of Aiven's most important markets.

In this role, you will engage C-level and senior stakeholders across both technical and business functions (e.g. CTO, CIO, VP Engineering, Head of Product) at scale-stage AI-native companies headquartered in the Bay Area. These may be model builders, agent and AI-application companies, AI infrastructure and developer-tools companies, and the product companies rebuilding their data plane for AI workloads. They are typically engineering-led.

You'll leverage Aiven's proven sales methodologies - MEDDPICC qualification, the Challenger Sales approach, and Command of the Message to manage complex sales cycles from prospecting to close.

What you'll do

• Get there first. Work a named list of Bay Area AI-native accounts. Be in the meetups, hackathons, founder dinners and engineering offices where new workloads get decided, and find the team that is about to need streaming, analytics or Postgres. Convert usage into committed contracts once the run-rate justifies it.
• Sell the way AI companies buy. At many of these companies, engineers and increasingly their coding agents choose infrastructure through Terraform, APIs and docs, not RFPs. Understand that path well enough to help people through it. Land usage-based customers through self-serve or Marketplace private offers, then convert them to committed contracts once usage justifies it.
• Identify Opportunities for competitive displacement within current customers and new prospect customers. Find teams on Cloud, especially on Google Cloud, who are reconsidering Take them from a migration assessment with the Solution Architect to a committed, deal-registered contract.
• Co-sell with Cloud partners. Marketplace private offers, startup credit programmes, deal registration on every co-sell opportunity, and the Google account teams that cover your accounts.
• Build the network that feeds the territory. Founders, platform engineers, investors and their portfolio teams. Work with Aiven for Startups and our investor relationships. Source speakers and co-hosts for Aiven's Bay Area meetups and developer evenings with our marketing team.
• Qualify as a diagnostic, forecast on evidence. MEDDPICC in Salesforce: a named champion, an engaged economic buyer and a quantified impact
• Bring the market back. Close the feedback loop, share learnings with Aiven product and leadership on what AI-native teams are building, what they choose instead of Aiven, and why, in specifics.

What you bring

• New logos closed at technical, high-growth companies selling data, developer or cloud infrastructure, on usage- or consumption-based pricing. You can show the numbers: quota, attainment, deal sizes, and how much of your pipeline you sourced yourself.
• You've built a territory from a standing start before, and you'd choose to do it again.
• Enough technical depth to hold your own with a platform engineer. You know what Kafka, ClickHouse, PostgreSQL and OpenSearch are for, how AI applications and agents use them, and what a Terraform-provisioned evaluation looks like.
• Fluency in MEDDPICC and Command of the Message, and the ability to change a buyer's plan with a technical/business insight rather than a slide.
• You're already part of the Bay Area AI and developer ecosystem, or you can show you've built a network like it before.
• You live in the Bay Area. This is an in-person role, split between our San Francisco office and your customers' offices.

If you don't match every line but you have built a territory in a technical market and can show the numbers, apply.
How we'll measure success

• First 90 days: fifteen first meetings with priority accounts, five qualified opportunities, your first pay-as-you-go lands, and deal registration on every Cloud partner co-sell opportunities.
• Six months: ten qualified opportunities, your first new Bay Area logos consuming or your first cometitive displacement win, and the first usage-based customer converted to a commitment.
• Twelve months: eight new Bay Area logos consuming, or two competitive displacement wins, with usage-based customers converted to committed contracts behind them.

What's next

You'll hear from our Talent Experience team within five days of applying. From there:

• A conversation with one of our Talent Experience Partners.
• A depth-of-expertise interview with the hiring manager. Bring your numbers. Depending on timing this may be in person)
• A working session with the team: you'll build a first-90-days plan for a set of real Bay Area accounts and run a live discovery conversation with our Solution Architect.
• An Aiven Values interview.

Amazing! What's next:

If you think Aiven is the place for you and that our Values align with yours, send us your resume and we'll get in touch!
Global Benefits:

On-Target Earnings $400K - $450K • Equity •

Our global benefits are designed to help you thrive and grow, personally and professionally:

• Participate in Aiven's equity plan.
• Balance work and life with our hybrid work policy.
• Choose the equipment you need to set yourself up for success.
• Use your Professional Development Plan budget for learning opportunities.
• Receive holistic wellbeing support through our global Employee Assistance Program.
• Inquire about our Global Time Off Commitment (Parental and Sick Leave, as well as Personal Time)
• Enjoy country-specific benefits for our global cast.