Senior Director, Strategic Account Executive, Frontier AI, San Francisco or New York

EPAM Systems•San Francisco, CA

33d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Strategic Account Executive, Frontier AI is a senior commercial leader responsible for building and growing relationships with leading AI labs and other organizations developing advanced foundation models. The role owns a focused portfolio of priority accounts, identifying, developing, and closing opportunities across the model training and evaluation lifecycle, including RL environments, evaluations, expert data, RLHF, coding environments, and red teaming. This is not a traditional enterprise technology sales role. The successful candidate brings direct experience selling into organizations building frontier models, understands how these organizations evaluate and purchase highly technical, research-driven services, and has credibility with research, engineering, and product stakeholders. The right person recognizes where an emerging research need can become a meaningful commercial engagement and knows how to move it from an early technical conversation to a durable, expanding customer relationship.

Requirements

Significant experience in strategic enterprise sales, account leadership, or business development within AI, machine learning, data services, or another highly technical market
Prior experience selling model-training, data, evaluation, or related technical services, with familiarity across RL environments, evaluations, RLHF, expert data, or red-teaming
Demonstrated understanding of how frontier AI organizations buy, including experience navigating research, engineering, legal, procurement, and executive stakeholders
Experience engaging directly with AI researchers and research engineers, and developing credibility with highly technical customer audiences
Experience owning and growing strategic customer relationships into multimillion-dollar accounts through new opportunity development and long-term account planning
Strong understanding of the current generative AI and frontier-model ecosystem, including the major organizations and commercial participants within it
Strong commercial judgment and negotiation skills, with the ability to navigate complex contracting and procurement environments

Nice To Haves

Direct experience selling to organizations such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, Microsoft, xAI, or other leading developers of frontier models
Experience selling services related specifically to RL environments, evaluations, expert data, RLHF, or coding-focused model training
Meaningful participation in the Frontier AI research and industry ecosystem, including relationships built through major AI conferences and technical communities
Experience expanding an initial pilot or research engagement into a significant multi-team or multi-year customer relationship
Experience working at a company specializing in frontier-model data, post-training, evaluations, or AI infrastructure

Responsibilities

Own the commercial relationship and growth strategy for a focused portfolio of priority frontier AI labs and foundation-model organizations
Build and expand relationships across research, engineering, post-training, product, research operations, procurement, and executive leadership, owning revenue, pipeline, and long-term account growth
Sell complex, customized services across the model development lifecycle, including RL environments, evaluations, reward and verifier-based training, RLHF, expert data, coding environments, and red-teaming
Develop opportunities from early research conversations through pilots, scaled programs, and strategic account expansion, navigating sales cycles where scope, pricing, and delivery models are built collaboratively with the customer
Engage directly with researchers, engineers, and technical leaders to understand the model capabilities they are seeking to improve and the challenges preventing further progress
Maintain sufficient technical fluency across RL environments, evaluations, RLHF, expert data, and agentic systems to recognize when an exploratory research discussion represents a commercial opportunity
Build a high-quality pipeline through proactive relationship development and research-driven discovery, owning opportunities from identification through proposal development, negotiation, and close
Navigate complex procurement, legal, and contracting processes while negotiating commercially attractive agreements, and drive expansion into adjacent research teams once EPAM establishes credibility
Lead customer discovery with EPAM technical experts to translate research objectives into technically credible and commercially compelling solutions
Coordinate proposals, pilots, and statements of work that connect the customer's research objective to EPAM's proposed solution, structuring pilots with a clear path toward scaled engagements
Build and maintain a strong professional network across the frontier AI research and model-development ecosystem, representing EPAM at key research conferences and technical gatherings
Use ecosystem engagement to stay close to emerging research priorities and help establish EPAM as a credible participant in the Frontier AI ecosystem, not simply a vendor selling into it