Founding Head of Partnerships (Vals Smith)

Vals AI•San Francisco, CA

2d•Onsite

About The Position

We’re looking for a founding Head of Partnerships to drive the next phase of company growth through Vals Smith, our enterprise product that tells customers which model is best for their use case. Every large enterprise organization is now being asked to pick model providers, justify the spend, and defend that choice internally. Almost none of them have evidence. They are making seven- and eight-figure decisions on vibes. Early users have already run Vals Smith against their own repositories, and we have more demand than we have capacity to work. In this role you’ll be responsible for generating pipeline, running complex enterprise sales cycles, and building the go to market playbook for Vals Smith from the ground up.

Requirements

3+ years of enterprise sales experience in SaaS or technology, ideally with exposure to AI.
Proven success closing six‑figure deals and managing complex sales cycles with multiple stakeholders.
Relevant and recent experience in outbound prospecting, especially to technical and enterprise personas
You do not need to write code but should have experience selling technical solutions to product and engineering leaders and the ability to translate complex technology into business value.
Comfort operating in an early-stage, high-growth environment, building new motions from scratch and iterating quickly.
Ability to work in-person, in San Francisco.

Nice To Haves

Learning velocity: The role encompasses a wide variety of tasks. Rather than expecting you to be an expert on Day 1, we are looking for someone who can learn new skills and technologies quickly.
Ownership : Working in a small, talent-dense team, we expect everyone to show initiative to build where it's needed, not where it's asked. We strive for autonomy over consensus.
Intensity : The LLM landscape is constantly changing. Foundation model labs are continuously pushing the frontier. The unicorn companies that will emerge from this technology shift are being built now. Those that win will have an incredibly high speed of execution.
Solution-oriented mindset : We're looking for people who see opportunities to craft solutions at each juncture, not those who pass hard problems to others or admit defeat.

Responsibilities

Own the full sales cycle for Vals Smith — outbound, discovery, technical evaluation, negotiation, close, and expansion.
Interact with senior leaders and decision makers at large enterprises
Work three pipeline sources from day one: inbound from our launch waitlist and early users, warm introductions from our founders and investors, and cold outbound you generate yourself
Build the playbook, including ICP definition, qualification criteria, outbound sequences, packaging, and objection handling
Work side by side with our founding PM and engineering team. You'll run technical evaluations and POCs together, carry what you hear in deals back into the roadmap and how we package the product
Use data and tooling to continuously monitor impact metrics and optimize strategy