Sales Development Representative

About Avante

Ask any employee to explain their benefits, and you'll likely get a confused shrug. Ask any HR leader if their benefits investment is working, and you'll get an honest "I don't know." For employees, benefits are confusing and overwhelming. For HR and finance leaders, benefits are the second-largest expense, but they lack the visibility to know what's working and what’s wasted.

At Avante, we're changing that. We're an AI-native benefits intelligence platform built to turn benefits complexity into clarity. For employees, our agent Carly provides personalized, always‑on benefits guidance. For benefits leaders, our agent Ava monitors their entire program, surfaces what needs attention, and delivers strategic intelligence on costs, utilization, and outcomes in seconds. Together, these agents create a closed-loop system where employee engagement data informs benefits strategy, and smarter strategy improves the employee experience.

We're based in Seattle and New York and work 4 days a week in the office (one day remote). We're growing fast, serving enterprise customers like Goldman Sachs, Samsung, Zscaler, and News Corp, and we're hiring a Sales Development Representative to build the top of our enterprise pipeline. This is an early seat on the sales team, reporting directly to the CRO, with room to grow as we scale.

We're looking for an experienced Sales Development Representative to own how Avante creates pipeline. You'll be the first conversation a prospect has with us, and you'll set the tone for everything that follows. The benefits leaders we sell to (CHROs, VPs of Total Rewards, benefits directors at Fortune 1000 companies) are busy, skeptical of AI hype, and flooded with point-solution pitches.

Your job is to cut through that with a sharp point of view about a problem they feel every day.

This role runs all three motions. You'll run cold outbound into enterprise HR and benefits leaders, qualify and convert inbound demand generated by marketing, and work leads sourced through our channel partners. You'll need to understand the difference between these motions and adjust your approach accordingly. A partner‑sourced warm intro is not the same conversation as a cold sequence into a CHRO who's never heard of us.

Because you'll report directly to the CRO, you'll have unusual visibility into how the whole go‑to‑market machine works, and unusual influence over how the SDR function gets built. The playbooks, sequences, and qualification frameworks aren't fully written yet. You'll help write them. The right person treats that as the best part of the job, not the scary part.

This is a fit for someone 2-3 years into a sales development career and may have also done full life-cycle sales who has carried a pipeline quota, knows how to research an account and write outreach that gets replies, and is ready to operate at a pace where weeks feel like months.

• Build an enterprise pipeline across three motions. Run cold outbound into Fortune 1000 HR and benefits leaders, qualify inbound demand from marketing, and convert warm introductions from our channel partners. Own your number and the activity that gets you there.
• Research accounts like an analyst, not a list-puller. Before you reach out, understand the company's benefits ecosystem, recent moves, and likely pain. Avante sells into a complex domain. Generic outreach gets ignored. Specific, informed outreach gets meetings.
• Write outreach that earns a reply. Craft sequences and one-off messages that sound like a person who understands benefits, not a templated blast. You'll test angles, subject lines, and channels, and double down on what works.
• Qualify hard and hand off clean. Run discovery that separates real opportunities from noise, then deliver AEs a qualified meeting with full context so the next conversation starts strong. Close the loop every time.
• Use AI as a core part of how you work. We expect our SDRs to use AI tools daily to research accounts, draft and personalize outreach, summarize calls, and build their own workflows. We're an AI company. The person in this seat should be visibly better at their job because of how…