Original job description
You will be our first dedicated sales hire, and you will own revenue end to end: prospecting, discovery, demos, pilots, pricing conversations, and closed deals. Today sales is founder led. The founders have opened the first doors, run the first demos, and learned where the message lands and where it does not. Your job is to take that baseline and industrialize it.
About Sapien
Sapien is an AI quality company building Proof of Quality, or PoQ, an evaluation system for AI work, built for cases where the right answer is unknown, or a matter of judgment.
We spent two years and 195 million tasks learning how hard that problem is, and PoQ is what came out: the customer defines quality through a rubric, a panel of experts scores real work, agents supply the scale, and consensus makes the measure reliable.
Teams use PoQ to find where their AI work needs improving, and for confidence in the quality when it meets their standard.
The role
You will be our first dedicated sales hire, and you will own revenue end to end: prospecting, discovery, demos, pilots, pricing conversations, and closed deals. Today sales is founder led. The founders have opened the first doors, run the first demos, and learned where the message lands and where it does not. Your job is to take that baseline and industrialize it.
Be clear about what you are walking into. PoQ is a new category. There is no inbound engine yet, because inbound follows customers and we are still winning the first ones. That means this role is outbound first, and the volume bar is high. We do not need someone to nurse a warm pipeline. We need someone to build one from a cold start, at a scale of conversations well beyond anything we have run so far.
The deal is simple: we set the what, you own the how. Each quarter we agree on a small set of pipeline and revenue targets with you. Territories, sequencing, tooling, and tactics are entirely yours. You will not be judged on activity, effort, or how full the CRM looks. You will be judged on whether the numbers moved.
This is discovery sales, not playbook sales.
There is no proven ICP to inherit. We have strong signals: teams doing safety critical, regulated, or high liability AI work feel the problem most sharply, and are the ones who cannot afford unverifiable quality. But the exact segment, the exact buyer, and the price they will pay are still being mapped, and every conversation you run is a data point in that map.
That makes this role part seller, part market researcher. You will bring structured signal back from every call: what resonated, what the objection really was, what they would pay, and what they compared us to. That feedback shapes product, pricing, and positioning in near real time. If you need a locked pitch deck and a settled price book before you can sell, this is the wrong role. If discovering the market while selling into it sounds like the fun part, keep reading.
Credibility is the bar
We sell verification to technical buyers: AI labs, agent companies, data teams, and engineering leaders. These people distrust salespeople by default and trust competence on contact. Concretely:
You can run a technical demo yourself and answer the second and third question, not just the first.
Your outbound reads like it was written by someone who understands the buyer's actual problem, never like a sequence template.
You know when to bring in a founder or engineer, and when doing so would signal weakness.
You would rather disqualify fast than charm a bad-fit prospect through three more calls.
A pipeline full of polite conversations that never close is a liability. We want volume and credibility, in that order of difficulty.
Who this is for
We hire for trajectory, not tenure. You do not need ten years of enterprise sales or a famous logo on your resume. A hungry, high agency closer with technical chops and real numbers beats a polished enterprise seller who needs SDRs, brand air cover, and a mature playbook, every time. What you do need: proof you have sourced and closed real deals, technical aptitude, daily fluency with AI tools, a data habit, and high agency.
What you will own
The outbound machine. Build AI powered prospecting at serious volume: enriched target lists, personalized sequences, multi channel outreach, and the automation that keeps it running. Cold automated blasts convert terribly; your job is volume that still feels hand written. This is the single most important system you will build.
Full cycle sales. Discovery, demo, pilot, negotiation, close. You run the deal from first touch to signed invoice, pulling in founders and engineers deliberately, not by default.
Pilot velocity. Pilots are how a new category earns proof. Get qualified prospects into structured pilots fast, even when the near term economics are modest, and convert pilots into case studies, references, and expansion revenue.
ICP and pricing discovery. Turn every conversation into signal. Track objections, pricing reactions, and use case fit systematically, and feed it back into positioning, packaging, and product. You will help decide where PoQ wins, not just sell where you are told.
Network leverage. Mine and activate the networks around Sapien: investors, advisors, founders, and communities. Build a repeatable warm intro engine rather than waiting on favors.
Pipeline ops. Own the CRM, the pipeline dashboard, and the forecast. Every stage -instrumented, every conversion rate known, every experiment measured.
As deals start closing, you will help define the sales team that gets hired around you. The job is building the revenue machine, not just personally working deals.
What we look for
Proof you sourced and closed real business: deals, pilots, partnerships, or revenue you personally generated from cold. Numbers over narratives.
Fluent daily use of Claude, ChatGPT, and the current AI toolchain for prospecting, research, personalization, and follow up, for real work, not novelty.
Enough technical depth to demo a technical product credibly, hold your own with engineering buyers, and build your own tooling. Dangerous with Clay or similar enrichment, a modern CRM, sequencing tools, and basic scraping and APIs.
Comfort selling without a settled playbook: new category, evolving ICP, pricing still in discovery.
Crypto fluency is a strong plus. Sapien has a token aligned ecosystem, and some buyers and partners live onchain.
Speed. You launch, measure, and iterate weekly. You do not wait for perfect process.
How you will be measured
This role has a scoreboard. The specific targets get set together each quarter, but they will always be output metrics in four categories:
1) Qualified conversations. New qualified opportunities created, not emails sent or meetings booked.
2) Pilot conversion. Prospects moved into structured pilots, and pilots converted to paying customers.
3) Revenue. Closed won, invoices paid. Small and real beats large and theoretical.
4) Market signal. Documented, decision grade insight on ICP, pricing, and objections that changes what we build and how we sell.
If those numbers move quarter over quarter, you are succeeding. If they do not, no amount of pipeline theater changes that. If being measured this way excites you rather than scares you, keep reading.
The first 90 days
Day 90 is when the scoreboard goes live. By then you should have the outbound machine running at a volume the company has never seen, a fully instrumented pipeline with known conversion rates at every stage, multiple structured pilots in flight, at least one closed deal, and a clear, evidence backed read on which segments and price points win. The first 30 days are for absorbing every customer conversation to date, auditing the founder led pipeline, and shipping your first outbound sequences. After that, everything is scale and iteration.
How to apply
Send us your resume + two or three deals or pipelines you actually built: the starting point, the result, the timeframe, and what you personally owned. Screenshots of pipelines, sequences, and dashboards beat prose.
Then one more thing, and it matters most. Pick a company you think should buy Proof of Quality, tell us why, and write the exact outbound sequence you would send them.
