Strategic Account Executive

River AI•Palo Alto, CA

18h

About The Position

River AI is seeking experienced Founding Account Executives to drive growth and adoption of River API. River API enables companies and individuals to post-train open-weight models with their own data, producing models specialized for their use cases. The role focuses on creating and closing enterprise sales campaigns and turning the product’s technical capabilities into a growing business. This entrepreneurial, cross-functional position spans sales, partnerships, product, and technical customer engagement. The account executive will help establish River API’s go-to-market motion by identifying valuable customer segments, winning strategic accounts, developing partnerships, and creating repeatable systems for scaling adoption. The position is located in Palo Alto, California. Base pay is expected to be $200,000–$350,000 per year, depending on experience and skills, 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, and written 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 create the greatest value.
Build prospective customer relationships, understand technical and business requirements, and guide customers from initial exploration through pilot, deployment, and expansion.
Develop and manage a pipeline of enterprise opportunities, strategic partnerships, and distribution channels.
Contribute to the 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 important early customers.
Represent River with customers, partners, developers, and the broader AI community.