Account Executive
Run full-cycle sales into security and data teams adopting AI: prospecting through close, pilots through expansion. Early territory, direct access to the founders.
The role
You'll be one of our first dedicated sellers, running deals end to end with support from our founders and AI solutions architects. Our buyers are security, data, and AI leaders at mid-market and enterprise companies putting AI to work on sensitive data, with a focus on financial services, healthcare, and AI-native companies. Deals start as structured paid pilots with defined success criteria and convert to annual contracts.
What you'll do
- Build your own pipeline through outbound, events, and referrals.
- Run deals end to end: discovery, a demo with an AI solutions architect, a scoped paid pilot, and conversion to an annual contract.
- Manage buying groups that span security, data, AI, compliance, and procurement.
- Expand accounts after conversion into new data sources, use cases, and business units.
- Keep the CRM accurate and your forecast honest, and bring what you hear from buyers back into positioning and product.
What you bring
- 3+ years closing B2B software deals with a record against quota, preferably in security, data, or infrastructure software.
- Experience running technical sales cycles alongside a solutions engineer or architect.
- Comfort building pipeline from zero in a new territory.
- Enough technical curiosity to understand how RAG systems and AI assistants handle company data, and to explain why it matters to a buyer.
- U.S. citizenship.
Nice to have
- Experience selling into financial services or healthcare.
- Early-stage startup experience.
- Existing relationships with security or data leaders.
The details
- Location: Hybrid in Charlottesville, VA, or remote on Eastern Time.
- Compensation: Base salary up to $120K, OTE up to $255K, plus equity and health coverage.
- Eligibility: U.S. citizenship is required for this role because of our federal work.
About Hardshell
Hardshell secures the data layer of enterprise AI. Our platform measures what an AI deployment can leak, catches extraction from AI knowledge bases as it happens, and hardens sensitive data before any model touches it. It is model-agnostic and runs in the customer's environment, so sensitive data stays where it lives.
We're a seed-stage team headquartered in Charlottesville, Virginia. Our founders come from national security AI and cyber operations: our CTO spent five years advising the Department of Defense on AI security at the Joint AI Center and the CDAO, and our CEO served as an Army Cyber officer with assignments across U.S. Cyber Command and USSOCOM. We work with commercial customers in regulated industries and with federal and national security partners.
How to apply
Apply through the form on our careers page with your resume and LinkedIn profile. If more than one role fits, apply to the closest and say so in your note. Questions can go to careers@hardshell.ai.