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Founding Account Executive – Inside Sales

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Sales Remote (US)

About Herd Security

Herd Security is an agentic AI creative platform built for continuous security training and simulation. Founded in 2025, Herd helps organizations move beyond once-a-year compliance checkboxes, replacing static programs with dynamic curricula that evolve alongside emerging threats without adding operational overhead. Security and GRC teams use the platform as a creative partner to translate practitioner expertise into compelling content and deploy it across the channels employees frequently use, including Slack, Teams, and LMS. When a new threat surfaces, the platform enables organizations to shift from IT tickets or vendor requests to iterative microlessons delivered the same day. This puts the people behind security back at the center, empowering practitioner expertise, making awareness more habitual, and using every interaction to fuel a feedback loop that strengthens the human layer of defense.

Position Overview

We are hiring our Founding Account Executive to build the inside sales motion from the ground up. This is not a seat on an existing team—there is no existing team. You will be the first full-cycle seller at Herd, partnering directly with the founders to define our ideal customer profile, refine our pitch, close our earliest logos, and set the foundation for how Herd goes to market. The security awareness category is being redefined in real time by AI-native platforms like ours, and the buyer is hungry for something better than the tools they've been tolerating for a decade. Your job is to find those buyers, tell them a story they believe, and turn them into customers and champions.

This is an inside sales role—fully remote, phone and video-driven, with occasional travel for high-value opportunities, conferences, and customer visits. You will own a full-cycle motion: prospecting, discovery, demo, procurement, and close.

What You'll Own

You will be responsible for the full revenue cycle at Herd: sourcing pipeline through a mix of outbound, inbound, partner, and founder-generated leads; running discovery calls that uncover how security and GRC teams actually experience the pain of legacy awareness programs; delivering demos that showcase the platform as a creative partner rather than another tool; navigating procurement, security review, and legal at mid-market and enterprise accounts; and closing deals that set pricing and packaging precedents we'll carry forward as the company scales. Alongside the deals themselves, you will be a critical voice in shaping how Herd sells—what works, what doesn't, which objections keep surfacing, and which buyer personas convert. The playbook you help write will be the one future AEs inherit.

Responsibilities

  • Own full-cycle inside sales from prospecting through close, with a focus on mid-market and early enterprise accounts
  • Build and execute outbound prospecting motions across email, phone, LinkedIn, and security community channels
  • Partner with the founders on inbound leads, strategic accounts, and high-touch pursuits
  • Run structured discovery and demo processes that surface real buyer problems rather than feature checklists
  • Navigate multi-stakeholder deals involving CISOs, security awareness leads, GRC teams, IT, and procurement
  • Collaborate with product and engineering on customer feedback, feature requests, and gaps that are costing us deals
  • Help define and iterate on pricing, packaging, ICP definitions, and messaging based on what's actually converting
  • Contribute to early sales infrastructure: CRM hygiene, sequences, call recordings, deal reviews, and the first version of our sales playbook

Required Qualifications

  • 2+ years of B2B SaaS sales experience, with a track record of consistently hitting or exceeding quota
  • Experience selling into security, IT, or GRC buyers, or a demonstrated ability to learn a technical buyer quickly and credibly
  • Comfort operating without a playbook—you can generate pipeline, structure a deal, and close it when nobody hands you a process
  • Strong written and verbal communication; you can write a cold email that gets replies and run a discovery call that builds trust in the first five minutes
  • Genuine curiosity about the customer's world—you ask better questions than most AEs because you actually want to know the answers
  • Ability to collaborate closely with founders and cross-functional partners without needing layers of management in between

Preferred Qualifications

  • Prior experience as a founding AE or early-stage AE at a seed or Series A startup
  • Background selling security awareness, GRC, IAM, or adjacent security tooling
  • Experience selling AI-powered or AI-native products, including navigating the skepticism and excitement that come with them
  • Fluency with modern sales tooling (HubSpot, Apollo, Clay, LinkedIn Sales Navigator) and a point of view on which tools actually matter at this stage
  • Existing network among security awareness leaders, CISOs, or GRC practitioners

What Success Looks Like

In your first 90 days, you will have absorbed the product deeply enough to run demos without founder support, closed or meaningfully advanced early pipeline, and started documenting what's working and what isn't. In your first 6 months, you will have closed enough logos to validate core ICP hypotheses, contributed real shape to our pricing and packaging, and begun informing what the next sales hire should look like. In your first year, you will have built a repeatable motion that the next AEs on the team can plug into—and you will be the person they learn from.

Compensation & Benefits

  • Salary: $70,000–$140,000 OTE
  • Competitive base salary and uncapped commission
  • Meaningful equity—this is a founding role and the equity reflects that
  • Health, dental, vision, and life benefits
  • Unlimited PTO
  • WFH Stipend
  • Direct partnership with the founders on GTM strategy
  • Front-row seat to shaping a category as it's being defined

Logistics

  • Location: Remote — US Mandatory, California Preferred
  • Type: Full-time
  • Reports to: CEO
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