Sales Director, AI Sales

About the role

This is a player‑coach Director role and one of the most consequential go‑to‑market hires Sonar will make this year. You will build, lead, and personally sell alongside a founding team of 6–8 Senior Account Executives covering AI‑native startups (Series A–C) and digital‑native unicorns headquartered in the Bay Area. You will own the team's number, the team's culture, and a small portfolio of the most strategic accounts in the territory — typically the named foundation‑model labs and category‑defining digital natives where executive‑level relationship gravity matters most.

You report directly to the Sonar CRO. You will have visibility and partnership with Product, Engineering, and Developer Advocacy from day one, because this platform is technical, the buyer is technical, and the win patterns require the GTM leader to be as fluent in the product as the people building it. You will set the operating cadence — forecasting, pipeline reviews, deal inspection, account planning — and you will be the executive sponsor in the room when our largest deals are being decided.

This is a Bay Area field role. The buyers we sell to value being met where they are, and we expect this Director to spend real time in customer offices, at meetups, and at our San Mateo HQ — not behind a screen.

Sonar's revenue engine is built on high‑volume, product‑led growth — and the Bay Area team does not abandon that. While strategic enterprise deals will anchor the team's largest logos, a meaningful portion of the business comes from efficiently converting PLG signals — workspace signups, Git Hub installs, developer trial activity — into closed revenue  will lead a team that runs both motions in parallel: long‑cycle strategic pursuits and shorter‑cycle, inside‑sales‑style closes that do not require white‑glove treatment to get to a signature.

The best Directors here know when to deploy depth and when to deploy speed.

• You are a sales leader who has been the one in the room closing the deal, not just the one running the pipeline call. You've built and led teams selling technical products to engineering buyers — and you've done it in the Bay Area, where the bar for technical credibility is non‑negotiable.
• You think about hiring the way founders do: you have a bench, you can close talent the way you close customers, and you know that the team you build in the first six months sets the ceiling for everything that follows.
• You’re comfortable with ambiguity, you don’t need a fully built playbook to operate, and you write the playbook as you go.
• You read AI Twitter / X, you have a point of view on where AI coding agents are headed, and you can hold your own with a CTO talking about CI pipelines and code review workflows.
• You’d rather be in the room than on Zoom, and you expect the same from the team you lead.
• You have managed teams that run multiple deal sizes simultaneously and understand that a fast PLG‑conversion close is as commercially important as a six‑month strategic land.
• You have built or operated a velocity track inside an enterprise team — whether a dedicated inside‑sales pod, a PLG‑conversion motion, or a mid‑market segment — and you know what good looks like at both ends of the deal‑size spectrum.
• You do not mistake speed for sloppiness: you've put in place the sequence discipline, CRM rigour, and stage‑conversion accountability that make a volume motion run cleanly.

• Full‑funnel revenue performance for Sonar’s AI Sales Specialist team in your region: pipeline generation, conversion, forecast accuracy, attainment, and net retention on landed accounts.
• A personal book of the 2–3 most strategic accounts in the territory — modeling the selling motion you expect from the team.
• Recruiting, hiring, and ramping the founding 6–8 AEs — with a relentless bar, because every early hire shapes the next ten.
• The operating cadence: weekly pipeline, deal reviews, MEDDPICC‑grade qualification, monthly forecast, quarterly business reviews — without devolving into bureaucracy.
• The voice of the customer back to Product and Engineering; turning field signal into roadmap priorities.
• Partnership with Marketing and…