Strategic Account Executive

As a Strategic Account Executive at FriendliAI, you will be instrumental in driving our market expansion by securing high-value enterprise accounts and building strategic relationships with leading AI-forward companies. You'll focus on helping enterprises leverage FriendliAI's inference serving platform to achieve transformative cost savings and performance improvements across their AI deployments.

Environments

• Highly competitive base salary plus uncapped commission structure tied to enterprise deal value
• Equity in a rapidly growing AI infrastructure company
• Comprehensive benefits package
• Collaborative environment with exposure to cutting-edge AI technologies

Key Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end sales process with enterprises, from generating pipeline to closing high-value, strategic enterprise deals focused on AI inference and serving solutions
• Identify and capitalize on growth opportunities within existing accounts, becoming a trusted advisor for AI infrastructure optimization
• Build and maintain strategic relationships with CTOs, engineering leaders, ML/AI leaders, and other technical decision-makers at target enterprises.
• Manage technical POCs that demonstrate FriendliAI's superior performance and cost advantages, collaborating with internal engineering teams and enterprise clients
• Consistently generate and manage a robust pipeline by identifying enterprises with significant inference workloads and positioning FriendliAI's solutions strategically
• Lead tech community engagements, representing FriendliAI at premier AI/ML conferences, meetups, and industry events (AI Engineer World's Fair, AWS re:Invent, etc.)
• Cultivate strategic relationships with AI engineers, ML platform leaders, and technical decision-makers at target enterprises through community involvement
• Organize technical events; workshops, technical demos, and meetups showcasing FriendliAI
• Collaborate on technical content, case studies, and speaking opportunities that establish FriendliAI's market leadership
• Bring the voice of enterprise customers into product discussions, ensuring FriendliAI's roadmap aligns with market needs and competitive positioning
• Work closely with engineering teams to understand and articulate complex technical differentiators around inference optimization
• Analyze the competitive landscape and provide insights on enterprise AI infrastructure trends and requirements

Qualifications

• 5+ years of B2B enterprise sales experience
• Proven track record of closing $300K+ ARR deals and consistently exceeding revenue targets
• Experience selling AI inference, GPU compute, cloud infrastructure, bare-metal infrastructure, or other technical AI infrastructure solutions
• Strong technical background in AI/ML infrastructure, cloud platforms, compute, or developer tools
• Deep understanding of LLM deployment, inference serving, and AI/ML workflows
• Active participation in AI/ML tech communities with demonstrated networking abilities
• Experience managing technical POCs and multi-stakeholder enterprise sales cycles
• Excellent communication skills for engaging both C-level executives and technical teams

Preferred Experience

• AI inference, AI infrastructure, MLOps, cloud compute, bare-metal infrastructure, or developer tools company background
• Existing network within enterprise AI/ML, engineering, or infrastructure teams
• Technical degree or equivalent practical experience in AI/ML space
• Track record of organizing or speaking at tech meetups and industry conferences

About us

FriendliAI, a San Mateo, CA-based startup, is building the next-generation AI inference platform that accelerates the deployment of large language and multimodal models with unmatched performance and efficiency. Our infrastructure supports high-throughput, low-latency AI workloads for organizations worldwide. We are also integrated with the Hugging Face platform, allowing instant access to over 600,000 open-source models. We are on a mission to deliver the world's best platform for AI inference