Founding Account Executive

CareerVillage.org•Palo Alto, CA

35d•$95,000 - $105,000•Remote

About The Position

You’ll lead CareerVillage’s business development efforts across our core markets in workforce development and higher education. You’ll own both go-to-market (GTM) strategy and pipeline performance, including targets for deal volume, partner launches, and the number of learners we reach through those partners, while building the processes, playbooks, and tools that reduce cycle time, improve conversion rates, and strengthen impact storytelling. You’ll work closely with our CEO, Product, Marketing, and Partner Success teams to shape how we present Coach to institutional buyers and partners. This role is part strategist, part operator. You’ll spend as much time in discovery calls and demos as you will in refining our GTM system for scale. This is a fit for an entrepreneurial, analytical, and mission-driven builder who can translate insight into action. You’ll move fluidly between executive-level negotiations, data-driven experimentation, and coaching your sales team to excel.

Requirements

Have previous startup experience (ideally early stage but at a company you brought above $1M ARR)
6-8 years of hands-on execution style experience in business development, partnerships, or sales, ideally in the tech sector or the workforce innovation.
Experience as an entrepreneurial sales leader with past experience as a zero-to-one or founding account executive, skilled at experimenting across markets to find traction and shape our go-to-market path.
Proven ability to experiment across markets with a builder’s mindset, shaping and refining GTM systems in ambiguous, high-opportunity environments where no finished playbook exists.
Commercial rigor: you can talk pipeline math, pricing, payback periods, and win rates with confidence.
Accountability for hard numbers: you’ve previously been on the hook for concrete targets (e.g., deals closed, accounts launched, or users activated).
Technical fluency - you can demo AI products, discuss integrations or APIs with technical stakeholders, and translate technical features into business value.
Data-informed storytelling - you pair narrative with measurable outcomes and know how to build referenceable pilots that scale.
Mission alignment - you care about equity, career mobility, & using tech for social impact.

Nice To Haves

Have experience building partnerships in the workforce, learning, or tech ecosystems, but please do not hesitate to apply if you do not have direct experience in these sectors.
Cross-segment fluency - you’re comfortable pivoting between higher ed, tech partners, corporate L&D, and job training providers.
Have run pilots that moved from discovery to expansion, or built early revenue engines in growth-stage organizations
Bring consulting, sales ops, or RevOps experience that strengthens your ability to design systems, not just execute them
Leadership - you’ve hired, coached, or managed BDRs or AEs, and built a performance-oriented, learning-driven culture. You’re excited to help hire and shape a small, high-output BD pod here.

Responsibilities

Own top deals: Lead discovery, demo, negotiation, and contracting for high-value partnerships that anchor our GTM strategy.
Build and manage the pipeline: Oversee outreach, qualification, and forecasting. Maintain strong Salesforce discipline and ensure consistent visibility into performance metrics, with a focus on growing the number of active partner deployments and learners using Coach through those partners.
Spearhead the sales motion: Set weekly cadences, coach on discovery and objection handling, and model commercial excellence through hands-on selling.
Integrate AI and automation: Leverage AI to improve productivity, accelerate research, and test new approaches to prospecting and engagement.
Run rapid market experiments: testing segments, messaging, target profiles, and partnership models, then codify what works into clear, repeatable playbooks that reveal where the strongest traction exists.
Collaborate cross-functionally: Partner with Product, Engineering, and Impact teams to feed insights from the field back into the roadmap, messaging, and evidence-building.
Measure and optimize performance: Track conversion, cycle time, CAC, ROI, and scale metrics such as partners launched and active learners per deployment. Use data to guide resourcing and prioritize opportunities.
Drive GTM strategy: Help define market segmentation, ICPs, pricing logic, and value propositions across key buyer segments (job training, higher ed, corporate L&D). You’ll help decide where we bet next (by segment) and design experiments to prove or disprove those bets.
Guide/Develop assets: Partner with Impact and Marketing to create early case studies, ROI models, and success narratives that drive credibility and scale.