Account Executive, Digital Natives

Blacksmith•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

As an Account Executive, Digital Native, you'll own new business across a territory of high-growth, engineering-driven companies. This is a hunter role. You'll be responsible for building pipeline, breaking into high-potential accounts, running technical sales cycles, and closing net-new customers. Our buyers are engineers, platform teams, engineering leaders, founders, and CTOs. You'll need to be comfortable selling a deeply technical product, understanding how customers build and ship software, and connecting infrastructure performance to meaningful business outcomes. You'll work closely with our Solutions Engineers, founders, product, and engineering teams. As an early member of the GTM organization, you'll also help shape how we sell, where we focus, and how we scale the Digital Native motion.

Requirements

3+ years of quota-carrying AE experience, ideally selling infrastructure, developer tools, cloud services, observability, security, or technical SaaS.
A track record of consistently generating your own pipeline and winning net-new logos.
Comfortable selling to engineers and technical executives and can build credibility with highly technical buyers.
Curious enough to learn how the underlying technology actually works.
Know how to run a structured sales process while moving quickly when the customer is ready to move.
Can navigate both bottom-up adoption and top-down enterprise buying motions.
Experience multithreading, building champions, and connecting technical value to business outcomes.
Communicate clearly and can make complicated infrastructure concepts easy to understand.
High standards for preparation, follow-through, and pipeline discipline.
Want to build. You'd rather help create the playbook than inherit one.

Nice To Haves

Experience selling into Digital Native, startup, or developer-first companies.
Experience selling CI/CD, developer infrastructure, cloud infrastructure, observability, databases, security, or adjacent products.
Familiarity with GitHub Actions, CI pipelines, cloud economics, or developer productivity.
Experience working in a PLG or product-led sales environment.
You've worked at an early-stage or hypergrowth company and understand the pace and ambiguity that comes with it.
You've built territories, outbound motions, or sales processes from scratch.

Responsibilities

Build and close your territory: Own a territory of high-growth, engineering-driven companies from prospecting through close. Identify the accounts where Blacksmith can have the greatest impact and develop a point of view on how to win them. Build relationships across engineering, platform, DevOps, finance, and executive stakeholders. Run a disciplined sales process from initial conversation through evaluation, commercial negotiation, and close.
Generate your own pipeline: Create pipeline through targeted outbound, creative prospecting, events, referrals, and your own network. Use product signals, engineering growth, cloud usage, funding, hiring, and other signals to prioritize the right accounts. Find creative ways into companies rather than relying on high-volume outbound. Partner with marketing and growth while maintaining ownership of your territory.
Sell a deeply technical product: Partner with Solutions Engineers to run technical discovery, evaluations, and proof-of-concepts. Develop a strong understanding of CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, developer workflows, and the economics of running compute at scale. Understand a customer's existing architecture and build a clear case for why Blacksmith should become part of their infrastructure. Translate improvements in speed, reliability, developer productivity, and infrastructure cost into a compelling business case.
Run great deals: Multithread from individual engineers and platform teams to engineering leadership, founders, and CTOs. Build champions and understand the technical, economic, and organizational drivers behind a purchase. Navigate security, procurement, legal, and commercial negotiations. Maintain strong pipeline hygiene and forecast accurately.
Help build the GTM motion: Bring customer and market feedback directly to product and engineering. Help refine our messaging, qualification criteria, sales process, and playbooks. Identify patterns in what's working and turn them into repeatable motions for the rest of the team. Operate like an owner. We're still early, and you'll have meaningful influence over how we build the sales organization.