Principal AI Sales Specialist

Cohesity•Boston, MA

4d•$354,400 - $443,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Cohesity is a leader in AI-powered data security and management. Aided by an extensive ecosystem of partners, Cohesity makes it easy to secure, protect, manage, and get value from data — across the data center, edge, and cloud. Cohesity helps organizations defend against cybersecurity threats with comprehensive data security and management capabilities, including immutable backup snapshots, AI-based threat detection, monitoring for malicious behavior, and rapid recovery at scale. GAIA is Cohesity’s enterprise AI platform for unlocking the value of unstructured data across the Cohesity Data Cloud. It helps customers securely search, understand, summarize, and reason across current and historical enterprise information, while preserving permissions, provenance, and governance. GAIA also provides a foundation for agentic AI by making trusted enterprise context available to AI applications, copilots, and agents - helping customers move from simply protecting data to using it as a strategic source of intelligence and action. Why now: This role is a founding GTM role in Cohesity's new AI Business Unit. GAIA is where the market is heading - enterprises secured their data with us; now they want to activate it for AI. You'll build the sales playbook on top of 13,000 existing customers and co-sell muscle from NVIDIA and the hyperscalers, carrying a brand-new number in a market that's just opening. Ground floor, executive air cover, and a partner ecosystem already generating pipeline.

Requirements

10-12 years of quota-carrying technology sales experience, including time in a specialist selling role, with 2-3 years specifically selling AI products to VP of AI, CAIO, CDO, or equivalent buyers.
Infrastructure selling experience — you know what it takes to get a platform decision made, not just a point-tool purchase.
A demonstrated track record generating your own pipeline in complex, multi-stakeholder enterprise accounts — hunter, not order-taker.
Working fluency in the AI landscape: platforms, deployment models, use cases, value drivers, and where the risk actually sits. This is a business-value and consultative-selling role, not a hands-on technical practitioner seat.
Experience selling both product/infrastructure and consulting-advisory engagements to enterprise, data-driven, or high-growth technology customers.
Proven ability to build and deliver executive-grade decks and proposals that hold up in front of a buying committee.
Comfort operating in a co-sell / specialist model — you drive the AI motion, field account teams own the primary relationship, and you make that partnership work.
Disciplined CRM and forecasting habits. If it's not in the system, it doesn't count.
Bachelor's degree required.
Demonstrated ability to leverage AI tools to enhance productivity, streamline workflows, and support decision making.
Professional English language proficiency for customer and internal communication.

Nice To Haves

Existing relationships with CAIOs, CDOs, or VP-of-AI buyers at Fortune 500 or high-growth East Coast enterprises.
Prior specialist overlay experience at a data infrastructure, cloud, or AI platform vendor.
Comfort working a co-sell motion with NVIDIA, AWS, Azure, or GCP field teams.
Language capability matched to the assigned territory (e.g., Arabic for Emerging/Gulf accounts, Mandarin/Cantonese for APJ) is strongly preferred; business-level English is required for all positions.

Responsibilities

Own GAIA revenue number across product/infrastructure and consulting-advisory bookings for your territory — you generate it, you carry it, you close it.
Be the AI subject-matter resource in every deal you touch — data architecture, use cases, deployment models, and the business case behind them, credible enough to hold the room with a CAIO, CDO, or VP of AI.
Build pipeline, Partner with marketing, SDRs, and field sales, but don't wait on them — daily and weekly outbound across multiple channels is part of the job, not a fallback.
Identify, qualify, develop, and close AI opportunities by working existing field relationships and building new ones with your own network.
Build and deliver executive-quality pitch decks, proposals, and business cases that translate the technology into a value story specific to the account — not a template with a logo swapped in.
Blend product/infrastructure opportunities with consulting and advisory engagements into multi-phase account plans — the first deal should set up the next one.
Work the AI partner ecosystem for your region — NVIDIA, the hyperscalers, infrastructure OEMs, and emerging AI vendors — for joint pipeline, co-sell motion, and deal registration.
Run disciplined pipeline hygiene: accurate CRM, honest stage progression, forecasts people can plan against.
Show up in cadence calls and pipeline reviews with something useful — market intel, competitive read, what worked and what didn't — not just a status update.