Founding Account Executive - Lithos Ai

Unusual Ventures • San Francisco, CA

5d

About The Position

Lithos builds high-speed agentic inference using frontier open models at full precision on standard GPUs. Its engine ranks highly on Artificial Analysis for output speed, time to first token, and end-to-end latency, and serves startups and large enterprises through a public API or on customers’ own hardware. Founded by Carnegie Mellon computer science professors, Lithos is a small team making one of its first ten hires.

The Founding Account Executive will convert strong enterprise interest into revenue as an individual contributor. The role owns early enterprise deals end to end, runs technical sales with founders and engineers, builds pipeline, documents the emerging sales playbook, and informs product and pricing decisions through direct customer feedback. The person hired will help establish the sales approach on which Lithos’s future sales organization will be built.

Requirements

• At least 5 years of experience closing complex, technical enterprise deals, ideally in AI infrastructure, cloud, developer platforms, or data infrastructure.
• A record of closing six- and seven-figure deals with technical buyers, with the ability to explain how those deals were won.
• Experience as an early or founding sales hire at a startup, building the sales process rather than following an established one.
• Comfort with in-depth technical conversations with engineering leaders and ability to learn unfamiliar topics quickly.
• Motivation to remain hands-on, focused on closing deals and building something new rather than immediately managing a team.

Nice To Haves

• Experience selling usage-based or consumption pricing, GPU or cloud capacity, or AI and ML tooling.

Responsibilities

• Own initial enterprise opportunities from technical evaluation through pilot, pricing, procurement, and signature.
• Work with founders and engineers to scope pilots, define success criteria, and demonstrate Lithos’s speed advantage on customer workloads.
• Build pipeline by identifying and opening accounts at companies developing AI agents and customer-facing AI features where speed matters.
• Document buyer profiles, reasons for purchasing, objections, pricing outcomes, and deal timelines; provide founders with clear feedback on what does and does not close.
• Bring customer feedback to the founding team and help shape product development and pricing.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed