Senior Director, Strategic Account Executive, Frontier AI, San Francisco

The Strategic Account Executive, Frontier AI is a senior commercial leader responsible for building and growing relationships with leading AI labs and other organizations developing advanced foundation models. The role owns a focused portfolio of priority accounts, identifying, developing, and closing opportunities across the model training and evaluation lifecycle, including RL environments, evaluations, expert data, RLHF, coding environments, and red teaming.

This is not a traditional enterprise technology sales role. The successful candidate brings direct experience selling into organizations building frontier models, understands how these organizations evaluate and purchase highly technical, research-driven services, and has credibility with research, engineering, and product stakeholders. The right person recognizes where an emerging research need can become a meaningful commercial engagement and knows how to move it from an early technical conversation to a durable, expanding customer relationship.

Req.#Responsibilities Own the commercial relationship and growth strategy for a focused portfolio of priority frontier AI labs and foundation-model organizations

Build and expand relationships across research, engineering, post-training, product, research operations, procurement, and executive leadership, owning revenue, pipeline, and long-term account growth

Sell complex, customized services across the model development lifecycle, including RL environments, evaluations, reward and verifier-based training, RLHF, expert data, coding environments, and red-teaming

Develop opportunities from early research conversations through pilots, scaled programs, and strategic account expansion, navigating sales cycles where scope, pricing, and delivery models are built collaboratively with the customer

Engage directly with researchers, engineers, and technical leaders to understand the model capabilities they are seeking to improve and the challenges preventing further progress

Maintain sufficient technical fluency across RL environments, evaluations, RLHF, expert data, and agentic systems to recognize when an exploratory research discussion represents a commercial opportunity

Build a high-quality pipeline through proactive relationship development and research-driven discovery, owning opportunities from identification through proposal development, negotiation, and close

Navigate complex procurement, legal, and contracting processes while negotiating commercially attractive agreements, and drive expansion into adjacent research teams once EPAM establishes credibility

Lead customer discovery with EPAM technical experts to translate research objectives into technically credible and commercially compelling solutions

Coordinate proposals, pilots, and statements of work that connect the customer's research objective to EPAM's proposed solution, structuring pilots with a clear path toward scaled engagements

Build and maintain a strong professional network across the frontier AI research and model-development ecosystem, representing EPAM at key research conferences and technical gatherings

Use ecosystem engagement to stay close to emerging research priorities and help establish EPAM as a credible participant in the Frontier AI ecosystem, not simply a vendor selling into itRequirements

Significant experience in strategic enterprise sales, account leadership, or business development within AI, machine learning, data services, or another highly technical market

Prior experience selling model-training, data, evaluation, or related technical services, with familiarity across RL environments, evaluations, RLHF, expert data, or red-teaming

Demonstrated understanding of how frontier AI organizations buy, including experience navigating research, engineering, legal, procurement, and executive stakeholders

Experience engaging directly with AI researchers and research engineers, and developing credibility with highly technical customer audiences

Experience owning and growing strategic customer relationships into multimillion-dollar accounts through new opportunity development and long-term account planning

Strong understanding of the current generative AI and frontier-model ecosystem, including the major organizations and commercial participants within it Strong commercial judgment and negotiation skills, with the ability to navigate complex contracting and procurement environments

Nice to have Direct experience selling to organizations such as OpenAI, Anthropic,…