Founding AE

Clera connects exceptional startup talent with early-stage companies backed by leading investors. Our clients build AI-native products, scalable B2B SaaS, and consumer applications where teams ship fast and individuals influence direction. We prioritize candidate control: companies request interviews and candidates decide which opportunities to pursue.

Role overview: A founding sales hire responsible for owning the full sales cycle and building the first repeatable revenue engine for Seed–Series B startups. This is a hands-on closing role: you will source, qualify, run discovery, demo, negotiate, and close while defining the scalable sales motion the team will follow as it grows. The position offers significant ownership, direct founder collaboration, and meaningful equity alongside competitive cash compensation.

What you'll do:

• Own the full sales cycle end-to-end: prospecting, qualification, discovery, tailored demos, proposals, negotiation, and close.
• Design, run, and iterate targeted outbound programs: persona definition, sequencing, personalization, and disciplined follow-up.
• Conduct disciplined discovery and demos that translate technical capabilities into measurable business outcomes for technical and economic buyers.
• Develop and document a repeatable sales playbook covering qualification criteria, messaging, objection handling, and pricing guidance.
• Partner closely with founders, product, and engineering to land early enterprise and design-partner deals and to feed customer insight into the roadmap.
• Define and track KPIs, forecast accurately, analyze win/loss, and prioritize deals and experiments with the highest impact.
• Recruit, mentor, and scale the sales function as the business matures.

Minimum qualifications:

• 3–8 years in a closing role (AE, founding sales, or equivalent) with demonstrated ownership of pipeline and revenue at startups.
• Proven track record of carrying and hitting quota, ideally building initial repeatable revenue from zero.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; ability to craft outreach, proposals, and business cases that move technical buyers.
• Comfort using CRM and pipeline data to define hypotheses, forecast, and iterate quickly.
• Experience working closely with founders, product, and engineering in high-ambiguity, fast-moving environments.

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience selling into technical buyers or running founder-led sales motions.
• Prior early-sales hire experience—standing up a sales motion or process from scratch.
• Familiarity with AI-native products or integrating LLM/AI value propositions into discovery and demos.
• Experience scaling sales teams at Seed–Series B startups and hiring or mentoring junior reps or SDRs.

How success is measured:

• Clear, attributable pipeline and closed-won revenue tied to your motion.
• Improved funnel conversion and reduced cycle time from first touch to close.
• Repeatable, documented sales playbooks that the team can execute and scale.
• High-quality customer relationships and actionable product/market signals provided to the team.

Compensation & benefits:

• Base salary: $130,000–$220,000+ depending on experience.
• Uncapped commission / OTE aligned with performance.
• Meaningful early-stage equity in pre-seed through Series B companies.
• Opportunity for high-impact ownership, rapid career growth, and close collaboration with founders and product teams.