Founding Account Executive

Where We Are
Engineers spend their days switching between dashboards, terminals, and observability tools. They diagnose issues, chase alerts, and do the repetitive work that keeps systems running. Most of it isn't hard. But it's constant. It crowds out the work that actually makes systems better.

Cleric is an AI SRE teammate. We autonomously diagnose production issues across complex distributed systems. Not just the big outages. The small stuff too. No fix is too small. Engineers can focus on building. Systems get more resilient because problems actually get addressed.

Think of it this way: coding agents are becoming the future of the IDE. Cleric is the equivalent for production operations. We're the future replacement for the dashboards and terminals where engineers who monitor production live today.

It's working. Gartner named us a Cool Vendor in SRE and Observability. 80% of diagnoses are rated as accurate by senior engineers. Teams see value in 24 hours. Two-week pilots convert to one-year contracts. Customers include BlaBlaCar, the largest long distance mobility platform in Europe and we've raised $9.8M from Zetta and Vertex.

What we need now is someone to turn that traction into a sales engine.

The Role
We have a repeatable sales process. Demos are straightforward. Contracts are standardized. Pilots close in two weeks. The product sells when it gets in front of the right people.

You'll be our first dedicated sales hire. You'll own the full sales cycle from qualified lead to signed contract. Run first demos, drive deals through evaluation, coordinate pilots with our engineering team, and close. You'll work directly with the founders. High autonomy, hands-on, and full agency to shape how we sell.

Pipeline

• Work qualified leads from our SDR and inbound channels
• Run discovery calls and first demos independently
• Build account plans for companies running complex distributed infrastructure

Deal Execution

• Own deal momentum. Follow-ups, stakeholder mapping, objection handling. No deal sits idle.
• Coordinate two-week technical evaluations with our PM and engineering team
• Navigate security reviews and procurement with standardized contracts
• Drive to close on annual contracts

Build the Function

• Execute hands-on first. Prove what works before building a team around it.
• Shape our sales process, tooling, and playbook as you learn what works
• Feed product and marketing with what you hear from prospects. Your signal matters.

Who You Are

• Based in SF and excited to work in-office.
• You can hold a 30-minute technical conversation with an SRE lead or platform engineering manager without getting lost. You don't need to be an engineer, but you can't fake it with infrastructure buyers.
• You've sold DevOps, infrastructure, or platform tooling before. Observability, incident management, cloud, Kubernetes ecosystem. You know the space.
• You're comfortable selling to both technical practitioners and engineering leadership.
• You've done this before there was a big team, clean data, or an established playbook. Early-stage startup experience where you built the motion, not just inherited it.
• You're scrappy. You ship imperfect things, learn fast, iterate.
• You're comfortable owning a revenue number.

How We Work
We bias toward launching and learning. A deal that moves forward imperfectly beats a perfectly crafted pitch that ships next week.

Some sales orgs optimize for process and predictability. We optimize for speed and iteration. Both approaches can work. Ours requires comfort with imperfect information and a willingness to figure it out as we go.

What Success Looks Like
90 days in:

• You're running the full sales cycle independently
• Prospects trust you to drive their deal forward. You're the person they hear from every week.
• Pipeline is moving. Deals have next steps, not open loops.
• You've closed your first deals or have contracts out for signature.
• You've shaped a repeatable playbook that the next hire could follow
• Engineering and product trust you to represent Cleric accurately

Why Now
The product works and we have real traction. What's missing is the engine to turn that into consistent growth. You'd be building it at a company where the hard part - making something engineers actually want - is already done.

Interview Process

• Screening call with founder (30 mins) - How you think, your sales experience, questions on the role
• Working session (60 min) - Prep for a mock discovery call + present your 90-day plan. Ask us anything you need.
• Presentation (60 min) - Run the discovery call + present your 90-day plan
• Bar raiser over coffee (45 min) - Culture fit with founder. Values, working style, hard questions both directions