Account Executive

Kernel•San Francisco, CA

29d

About The Position

Kernel is crazy fast, open source browser infrastructure for AI agents. We handle autoscaling, observability, and the messy details of web interaction, so developers can focus on what their agents do instead of how they do it. Teams at Cash App, Rye, and 5000+ others use Kernel for deep research, QA automation, and real-time web analysis. We've raised $22M from Accel, YC, and Vercel. If you're interested in building critical infrastructure for agents on the web, we'd love to chat. About the role You'll be one of the first members of a lean sales team. You'll own the full sales cycle for Kernel, from initial conversation to closed deal. That means prospecting and qualifying the right accounts, running discovery that gets to the real problems a customer is solving, and building relationships with the developers and technical leaders who'll rely on Kernel for their production systems. This is a technical-leaning AE role. You'll spend time understanding prospects' technical requirements, not just running a deck, and you'll lean on customer success & solutions, engineering, and product team members to keep technical questions from slowing down a deal.

Requirements

4+ years of closing experience in a sales role, ideally selling technical or developer-facing products
Comfortable selling to technical buyers: you don't need to write code, but you can hold your own in a conversation about architecture, APIs, and how a product actually gets used
Experience running a full-cycle sales process, from outbound or inbound lead through negotiation and close
High tolerance for ambiguity — most of our customers are building things that don't have a playbook yet
You use AI daily in your own workflow, and are excited to be in an AI-native space
Excellent written and verbal communication, with the judgment to know when to loop in teammates versus close on your own

Nice To Haves

Experience selling developer tools, infrastructure, or API-first products
Familiarity with AI agents, browser automation, or the broader agent tooling landscape
Prior experience at an early-stage startup where you helped build the sales process, not just execute one

Responsibilities

Own your pipeline end-to-end: prospecting, qualification, discovery, negotiation, and close
Build and manage relationships with developers, engineering leaders, and technical decision-makers evaluating Kernel for production use
Partner with solutions engineering, customer engineering/success, and engineering as needed to scope technical requirements and keep deals moving from demo to signed contract
Give the team an accurate, up-to-date read on your pipeline and deal status
Represent the voice of the customer internally, feeding market and competitive intelligence back into product and go-to-market strategy
Help define what a repeatable sales motion looks like at Kernel — you're building the playbook, not just running one