Strategic Account Executive

River AI Inc.•Palo Alto, CA

3d•$200,000 - $350,000

About The Position

River AI is building personal AI owned and shaped by each individual, including the training infrastructure, open-weight model post-training, personal hardware, and interfaces needed by people and organizations to create their own AI models. The company is seeking experienced Founding Account Executives to drive growth and adoption of River API, which enables customers to post-train open-weight models using their own data. This entrepreneurial, cross-functional role focuses on turning River API’s technical capabilities into a growing business, particularly through enterprise sales campaigns. The Account Executive will help establish the go-to-market motion by identifying valuable customer segments, winning strategic accounts, developing partnerships, and creating repeatable systems for adoption. The position is based in Palo Alto, California, and offers an expected base salary of $200,000–$350,000 USD per year, plus equity.

Requirements

Significant experience in enterprise sales, business development, partnerships, or go-to-market roles at an AI, developer infrastructure, cloud, or enterprise software company.
Demonstrated track record of building a product or business from 0 to 1, including developing an initial market, winning early customers, and creating a repeatable growth motion.
Experience owning meaningful revenue targets and navigating complex enterprise sales cycles.
Strong understanding of how organizations evaluate, purchase, deploy, and expand technical products.
Ability to communicate effectively with technical stakeholders and business executives.
Technical fluency developed through STEM education, engineering or technical work experience, or extensive experience selling highly technical products.
Exceptional ownership, judgment, and bias for action in ambiguous, fast-moving environments.
Strong relationship-building, negotiation, written communication, and verbal communication skills.

Nice To Haves

Experience selling or partnering around foundation models, model training, inference infrastructure, developer platforms, data infrastructure, or other AI products.
Familiarity with open-weight models, fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, model evaluation, inference, or enterprise AI deployment.
Experience personally closing early enterprise customers before building or scaling a broader sales organization.
An existing network among AI-native companies, enterprise AI leaders, cloud providers, model developers, or systems integrators.
Experience developing partnerships that materially contributed to product distribution or revenue.
Comfort discussing APIs, model architectures, training workflows, data requirements, security, and deployment constraints with engineering and machine learning teams.
Experience working closely with founders, researchers, and engineers to shape product strategy based on customer feedback.

Responsibilities

Own revenue growth and enterprise adoption for River API, from strategy through execution.
Identify and prioritize industries, customer profiles, and use cases where custom post-trained models provide value.
Build relationships with prospective customers, understand their technical and business requirements, and guide them through exploration, pilots, deployment, and expansion.
Develop and manage a pipeline of enterprise opportunities, strategic partnerships, and distribution channels.
Contribute to River API’s early sales playbook, including positioning, qualification, pricing, pilots, procurement, and account expansion.
Work with engineering and research teams to translate customer needs into product requirements and improvements.
Design technical demonstrations, proofs of concept, and customer solutions that communicate the value of post-training open-weight models.
Establish partnerships with model providers, cloud and GPU infrastructure companies, systems integrators, consultancies, and other AI ecosystem participants.
Build scalable go-to-market systems, processes, and metrics while remaining involved in closing early customers.
Represent River with customers, partners, developers, and the broader AI community.