What are the responsibilities and job description for the Founding Account Executive position at Roark (YC W25)?
← All roles
Open role
Founding Account Executive
Go-to-market
Be the first person here whose whole job is turning interest into customers. You own the full cycle — source the pipeline, book the demo, run it yourself, and close. Roark is a technical product bought by engineers and AI teams, so you win by being credible in that room, not by reading a script. This is the seat that turns a great product into a real business.
What you'll do
Open role
Founding Account Executive
Go-to-market
- Remote
- San Francisco
Be the first person here whose whole job is turning interest into customers. You own the full cycle — source the pipeline, book the demo, run it yourself, and close. Roark is a technical product bought by engineers and AI teams, so you win by being credible in that room, not by reading a script. This is the seat that turns a great product into a real business.
What you'll do
- Own the full cycle end-to-end: prospect, book, demo, negotiate and close — no SDR to hand off from and no sales engineer to hide behind (yet).
- Run technically credible demos yourself — show engineers and AI teams how Roark tests, scores and monitors their voice agents, and field the hard questions live.
- Build the top of the funnel: outbound to teams shipping voice agents, inbound follow-up in minutes not days, and a motion repeatable enough to hire against.
- Get hands-on with the product — connect an agent, run a simulation, read a scorecard — so your demo is the real thing, not slides.
- Be the voice of the customer inside the company: route objections, lost-deal reasons and feature gaps straight to the founders and engineering.
- Write the first go-to-market playbook — messaging, qualification, pricing conversations — so the next five reps ramp in weeks, not quarters.
- 3 years closing technical or developer-facing products (dev tools, infra, APIs, ML/AI or observability), carrying a number and hitting it.
- Full-cycle reps: you have sourced your own pipeline and booked your own demos, not just closed what marketing handed you.
- Technical fluency — you can hold your own with engineers, learn a product deeply, and demo it without a sales engineer in the room.
- Real hunger for the top of the funnel: relentless follow-up, and happy to build pipeline from zero.
- Based in the San Francisco Bay Area — we are fully remote (no office), but we want this seat in SF, close to customers and to founders on the ground.
- You have been an early or founding go-to-market hire before, and can sell before the category fully exists.
- Familiarity with voice AI, LLMs, evals, or the teams building conversational agents.
- You thrive with founders and little structure — you would rather write the playbook than inherit one.
- live demo environments
- your CRM of choice
- Slack
- direct founder access