Sales Commission Lead

Fireworks AI•San Mateo, CA

1d•$180,000 - $225,000

About The Position

Reporting to the VP of Revenue Operations, the Sales Commissions Lead owns sales compensation end-to-end: plan strategy and design, field communication, dispute resolution, forecasting of commission expense, and the systems that turn closed deals and usage into accurate, trusted payouts. This is not a pure admin seat and not a blank-slate build. You inherit a working in-house commissions stack and extend it — plan docs, calculators, data pipelines, reporting, and payout workflows — while partnering tightly with FP&A, HR/People Ops, Sales leadership, and Data Engineering. You will own compensation for a rapidly scaling GTM org (300+ commissionable sellers across pre-sales and post-sales roles). Consumption and hybrid commit + usage economics are core to how we sell and how we pay. The right candidate has already owned commissions in a usage-based or hybrid commercial model — not only license ARR — and can design plans that drive the right field behavior without breaking Finance trust. The right candidate is an AI-native builder: hands-on with agentic tools (Cursor, Claude Code, or equivalent), shipping automation into the commissions operating system rather than managing a spreadsheet forever.

Requirements

7+ years in sales commissions, incentive compensation, or sales ops with deep commissions ownership; senior IC depth at a P4–P5 equivalent
Has familiarity with and owned multiple steps of end-to-end commission (plan design + payout ops), not only one side of the house
Hands-on experience designing and administering plans in a consumption-based or hybrid commit + usage commercial model
Strong systems builder: SQL (or equivalent) against CRM/billing data; comfortable extending in-house calculators and pipelines rather than only operating a packaged ICM tool
Proven cross-functional operator with Sales, FP&A, HR, and technical partners — can say no to a bad exception and still keep trust
Actively building with AI/agentic tools in current work; can name specific automation they've shipped (not "I use ChatGPT")
Excellent written communication: can explain plan mechanics to a rep in plain language and to Finance in audit-ready form

Nice To Haves

Experience at an AI/ML infrastructure, developer tools, or API-first company
Has scaled commissions through a high-growth headcount ramp (hundreds of sellers)
Familiarity with manager overrides, overlay roles (e.g. SAs / field engineers), marketplace/channel credit, and self-serve → sales-assisted conversion credit
Prior ownership of commission expense forecasting / accruals partnership with FP&A

Responsibilities

Own sales compensation plan strategy and execution across AE, manager, and pre-/post-sales overlay roles.
Design and iterate consumption-aware and hybrid commit + usage plans that align seller incentives with company goals (new logos, expansion, and healthy revenue mix).
Partner with Sales leadership, FP&A, and HR on plan changes, mid-period policy decisions, and clear field communication — including how changes are grandfathered and measured after the fact.
Own the quarter close for commissions: eligibility, calculations, exceptions, audits, and payout packages Sales and Finance will stand behind.
Run dispute resolution with judgment — protect plan integrity while staying credible with FLMs and reps.
Maintain definitional clarity (what counts as commissionable production, how credit is assigned, how overlays interact) and keep plan language, exhibits, and systems in sync.
Inherit and extend our in-house commissions tooling and data pipelines — do not rip-and-replace for a vendor by default.
Drive end-to-end automation of plan modeling, commission forecasting, attainment reporting, and payout production.
Partner with Data Engineering and GTM Engineering on source-of-truth data (CRM, billing/usage, roster/quotas) so calculations are reproducible and auditable.
Be the commissions point of contact for Sales VPs/FLMs, FP&A (commission expense and accruals), HR (exhibits, offers, terminations), and Data Eng.
Produce executive-ready views of commission cost, plan health, and incentive risk — recommendations, not just tables.
Build agentic workflows into how commissions runs: rule interpretation, edge-case triage, rep-facing explanations, regression checks on plan changes, and automated reporting.
Raise the bar for what "done" looks like: machine-readable plan logic, versioned assumptions, and tooling the field can self-serve against.