Founding Strategic Account Executive - Palo Alto, CA, United States

Originally posted 7 August 2026 by the employer.

River API enables companies to post-train open-weight models using their own data.

About the role

Founding Strategic Account Executives drive revenue growth and enterprise adoption for River API. River API enables organizations to post-train open-weight models using their own data.

What you'll do

- Own revenue growth and enterprise adoption for River API from strategy through execution. - Identify and prioritize target industries, customer profiles, and high-value post-training use cases. - Build prospective customer relationships, manage enterprise pipelines, and guide accounts from exploration through deployment and expansion. - Contribute to early sales playbooks across positioning, qualification, pricing, pilots, and procurement. - Partner with engineering and research teams to translate customer requirements into product specifications and design proofs of concept. - Establish ecosystem partnerships across model providers, cloud and GPU infrastructure companies, systems integrators, and consultancies.

What you'll need

- Enterprise sales, business development, partnerships, or go-to-market experience at an AI, developer infrastructure, cloud, or enterprise software company. - Track record of taking a product from 0 to 1, securing early customers, and creating a repeatable growth motion. - Experience owning enterprise revenue targets and navigating complex sales cycles. - Technical fluency acquired via a STEM degree, technical work experience, or extensive experience selling deeply technical products. - Experience managing technical evaluations, procurement, and deployment workflows with technical stakeholders and business executives.

Nice to have

- Experience selling or partnering around foundation models, model training, inference infrastructure, developer platforms, or data infrastructure. - Familiarity with open-weight models, fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, model evaluation, inference, or enterprise AI deployment. - Experience personally closing early enterprise customers before scaling a broader sales organization. - Existing network among AI-native companies, enterprise AI leaders, cloud providers, model developers, or systems integrators. - Comfort discussing APIs, model architectures, training workflows, data requirements, security, and deployment constraints with engineering and machine learning teams.