What are the responsibilities and job description for the Founding Account Executive position at Cartesia?
About Cartesia
Our mission is to build the next generation of AI: ubiquitous, interactive intelligence that runs wherever you are. Today, not even the best models can continuously process and reason over a year-long stream of audio, video and text—1B text tokens, 10B audio tokens and 1T video tokens—let alone do this on-device.
We're pioneering the model architectures that will make this possible. Our founding team met as PhDs at the Stanford AI Lab, where we invented State Space Models or SSMs, a new primitive for training efficient, large-scale foundation models. Our team combines deep expertise in model innovation and systems engineering paired with a design-minded product engineering team to build and ship cutting edge models and experiences.
We're funded by leading investors at Index Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, along with Factory, Conviction, A Star, General Catalyst, SV Angel, Databricks and others. We're fortunate to have the support of many amazing advisors, and 90 angels across many industries, including the world's foremost experts in AI.
About The Role
We're looking to hire a Founding Account Executive to drive our sales efforts and close deals from the ground up. As a key member of our founding GTM team, you'll play a crucial role in executing our sales strategy, with a focus on converting leads from our product-led growth model and closing enterprise deals. This role offers significant opportunity for growth, with the potential to build and lead a team as we expand.
Your Impact
🍽 Lunch, dinner and snacks at the office
🏥 Fully covered medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees
🏦 401(k) Plan
✈️ Relocation and immigration support
🦖 Your own personal Yoshi
Our Culture
🏢 We’re an in-person team based out of San Francisco. We love being in the office, hanging out together, and learning from each other every day.
🚢 We ship fast. All of our work is novel and cutting edge, and execution speed is paramount. We have a high bar, and we don’t sacrifice quality or design along the way.
🤝 We support each other. We have an open & inclusive culture that’s focused on giving everyone the resources they need to succeed.
Our mission is to build the next generation of AI: ubiquitous, interactive intelligence that runs wherever you are. Today, not even the best models can continuously process and reason over a year-long stream of audio, video and text—1B text tokens, 10B audio tokens and 1T video tokens—let alone do this on-device.
We're pioneering the model architectures that will make this possible. Our founding team met as PhDs at the Stanford AI Lab, where we invented State Space Models or SSMs, a new primitive for training efficient, large-scale foundation models. Our team combines deep expertise in model innovation and systems engineering paired with a design-minded product engineering team to build and ship cutting edge models and experiences.
We're funded by leading investors at Index Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, along with Factory, Conviction, A Star, General Catalyst, SV Angel, Databricks and others. We're fortunate to have the support of many amazing advisors, and 90 angels across many industries, including the world's foremost experts in AI.
About The Role
We're looking to hire a Founding Account Executive to drive our sales efforts and close deals from the ground up. As a key member of our founding GTM team, you'll play a crucial role in executing our sales strategy, with a focus on converting leads from our product-led growth model and closing enterprise deals. This role offers significant opportunity for growth, with the potential to build and lead a team as we expand.
Your Impact
- Own the entire sales cycle: prospect, qualify, run discovery, build business cases, and close strategic deals.
- Land and expand accounts by embedding with customers, driving adoption, and shaping long-term roadmaps.
- Build relationships with technical buyers, enterprise stakeholders, and C-suite executives by deeply understanding workflows and pain points.
- Collaborate directly with founders to create our GTM playbook, outbound motion, pricing, and sales collateral.
- Partner with Product, Engineering, and Marketing to translate customer insights into product improvements and refined messaging.
- Drive scalable sales processes, pipeline development, and repeatable GTM best practices.
- Deliver product demos, proposals, and partnership opportunities that accelerate growth.
- Provide market and customer feedback to leadership to inform strategy and expansion.
- 5 years of B2B SaaS sales experience with a proven track record of exceeding quota.
- Experience in high-growth, venture-backed startups (ideally as a founding AE or early GTM hire).
- Strong closer with success in complex, multi-stakeholder sales cycles, including 7-figure deals.
- Entrepreneurial self-starter who thrives with limited resources and full ownership of accounts.
- Technical curiosity and ability to quickly learn APIs, AI models, and developer-focused products.
- Customer-first mindset: skilled at discovery, negotiation, and building long-term strategic relationships.
- Excellent communicator who can influence technical teams, executives, and cross-functional stakeholders.
- Builder mentality: experienced in outbound pipeline generation and scaling repeatable GTM processes.
- Technical degree (CS, Engineering, Math, etc.).
- Experience selling AI/ML, Voice AI, or developer platforms.
- Background in product management or solutions engineering.
- Track record scaling GTM functions at top-tier early-stage startups.
🍽 Lunch, dinner and snacks at the office
🏥 Fully covered medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees
🏦 401(k) Plan
✈️ Relocation and immigration support
🦖 Your own personal Yoshi
Our Culture
🏢 We’re an in-person team based out of San Francisco. We love being in the office, hanging out together, and learning from each other every day.
🚢 We ship fast. All of our work is novel and cutting edge, and execution speed is paramount. We have a high bar, and we don’t sacrifice quality or design along the way.
🤝 We support each other. We have an open & inclusive culture that’s focused on giving everyone the resources they need to succeed.