Strategic Account Executive

Aiven is putting its first sales seat on the ground in the Bay Area, working exclusively with Digital Natives.

The AI-native companies being built here are choosing their data infrastructure now, that means the event backbone their agents and pipelines run on, the analytics store their traces and evaluations land in, the Postgres that becomes their system of record, the index behind retrieval. This seat is designed to be where those companies are today: early, engineering-led, moving fast, and about to make decisions they will live with for years.

You’ll be in the room when those decisions get made and stay in it as they scale. That is what partnership means at this stage, and it is why the outcome you sell is not a database.

It is a product that ships sooner because the team builds features instead of running infrastructure. A first workload in production in days, through the Terraform provider and a Marketplace private offer, not a procurement cycle. A cost line that scales with usage rather than with the platform team they would otherwise have to hire. And a data layer built on open source, on every major cloud or in their own account, so the first enterprise customer's compliance questions and the next round's growth don't force a re-platform.

Your job is to be first, and to turn usage into durable commercial relationships.

We're a global team of over 400 people, working together to push the boundaries of open-source technology and multi-cloud solutions. Our vision is to become the trusted Data & AI Platform for everyone, leveraging the most popular open-source technologies like Apache Kafka, Aiven for PostgreSQL, Aiven for Clickhouse, and Aiven for Open Search to help companies accelerate time-to-market, drive efficiency, and build innovative solutions across any cloud.

You will drive strategic growth by acquiring new Aiven customers and expanding relationships.

This is a high-impact, quota-carrying role focused on new logo acquisition, growing usage over baseline, and increasing customer commitments in one of Aiven's most important markets.

In this role, you will engage C-level and senior stakeholders across both technical and business functions (e.g. CTO, CIO, VP Engineering, Head of Product) at scale-stage AI-native companies headquartered in the Bay Area. These may be model builders, agent and AI-application companies, AI infrastructure and developer-tools companies, and the product companies rebuilding their data plane for AI workloads. They are typically engineering-led.

You’ll leverage Aiven's proven sales methodologies - MEDDPICC qualification, the Challenger Sales approach, and Command of the Message to manage complex sales cycles from prospecting to close.

• Get there first. Work a named list of Bay Area AI-native accounts. Be in the meetups, hackathons, founder dinners and engineering offices where new workloads get decided, and find the team that is about to need streaming, analytics or Postgres. Convert usage into committed contracts once the run-rate justifies it.
• Sell the way AI companies buy. At many of these companies, engineers and increasingly their coding agents choose infrastructure through Terraform, APIs and docs, not RFPs. Understand that path well enough to help people through it. Land usage-based customers through self-serve or Marketplace private offers, then convert them to committed contracts once usage justifies it.
• Identify Opportunities for competitive displacement within current customers and new prospect customers. Find teams on Cloud, especially on Google Cloud, who are reconsidering Take them from a migration assessment with the Solution Architect to a committed, deal-registered contract.
• Co-sell with…