As a Strategic Account Executive at FriendliAI, you will be instrumental in driving our market expansion by securing high-value enterprise accounts and building strategic relationships with leading AI-forward companies. You'll focus on helping enterprises leverage FriendliAI's inference serving platform to achieve transformative cost savings and performance improvements across their AI deployments.
Environments
Highly competitive base salary plus uncapped commission structure tied to enterprise deal value
Equity in a rapidly growing AI infrastructure company
Comprehensive benefits package
Collaborative environment with exposure to cutting-edge AI technologies
Key Responsibilities
Own the end-to-end sales process with enterprises, from generating pipeline to closing high-value, strategic enterprise deals focused on AI inference and serving solutions
Identify and capitalize on growth opportunities within existing accounts, becoming a trusted advisor for AI infrastructure optimization
Build and maintain strategic relationships with CTOs, engineering leaders, ML/AI leaders, and other technical decision-makers at target enterprises.
Manage technical POCs that demonstrate FriendliAI's superior performance and cost advantages, collaborating with internal engineering teams and enterprise clients
Consistently generate and manage a robust pipeline by identifying enterprises with significant inference workloads and positioning FriendliAI's solutions strategically
Lead tech community engagements, representing FriendliAI at premier AI/ML conferences, meetups, and industry events (AI Engineer World's Fair, AWS re:Invent, etc.)
Cultivate strategic relationships with AI engineers, ML platform leaders, and technical decision-makers at target enterprises through community involvement
Organize technical events; workshops, technical demos, and meetups showcasing FriendliAI
Collaborate on technical content, case studies, and speaking opportunities that establish FriendliAI's market leadership
Bring the voice of enterprise customers into product discussions, ensuring FriendliAI's roadmap aligns with market needs and competitive positioning
Work closely with engineering teams to understand and articulate complex technical differentiators around inference optimization
Analyze the competitive landscape and provide insights on enterprise AI infrastructure trends and requirements
Qualifications
5+ years of B2B enterprise sales experience
Proven track record of closing $300K+ ARR deals and consistently exceeding revenue targets
Experience selling AI inference, GPU compute, cloud infrastructure, bare-metal infrastructure, or other technical AI infrastructure solutions
Strong technical background in AI/ML infrastructure, cloud platforms, compute, or developer tools
Deep understanding of LLM deployment, inference serving, and AI/ML workflows
Active participation in AI/ML tech communities with demonstrated networking abilities
Experience managing technical POCs and multi-stakeholder enterprise sales cycles
Excellent communication skills for engaging both C-level executives and technical teams
Preferred Experience
AI inference, AI infrastructure, MLOps, cloud compute, bare-metal infrastructure, or developer tools company background
Existing network within enterprise AI/ML, engineering, or infrastructure teams
Technical degree or equivalent practical experience in AI/ML space
Track record of organizing or speaking at tech meetups and industry conferences
About us
FriendliAI, a San Mateo, CA-based startup, is building the next-generation AI inference platform that accelerates the deployment of large language and multimodal models with unmatched performance and efficiency. Our infrastructure supports high-throughput, low-latency AI workloads for organizations worldwide. We are also integrated with the Hugging Face platform, allowing instant access to over 600,000 open-source models. We are on a mission to deliver the world's best platform for AI inference
Skills Required
- 5+ years of B2B enterprise sales experience
- Proven record of closing $300K+ ARR deals and exceeding revenue targets
- Experience selling AI inference, GPU compute, cloud infrastructure, bare-metal infrastructure, or technical AI infrastructure solutions
- Strong technical background in AI/ML infrastructure, cloud platforms, compute, or developer tools
- Deep understanding of LLM deployment, inference serving, and AI/ML workflows
- Active participation in AI/ML technology communities and demonstrated networking abilities
- Experience managing technical proofs of concept and multi-stakeholder enterprise sales cycles
- Excellent communication skills for engaging C-level executives and technical teams
- Background in AI inference, AI infrastructure, MLOps, cloud compute, bare-metal infrastructure, or developer tools
- Existing network within enterprise AI/ML, engineering, or infrastructure teams
- Technical degree or equivalent practical experience in AI/ML
- Experience organizing or speaking at technology meetups and industry conferences
What We Do
FriendliAI is The Frontier AI Inference Cloud: an AI infrastructure platform that deploys, scales, and monitors large language and multimodal models. Its inference engine maximizes GPU utilization to deliver faster performance and steep cost savings for open-weight and custom models, while offering enterprise-grade reliability, SLAs, and compliance to help teams run generative AI and agent workloads at production scale.
