Founding GTM Lead

## The opportunity

We're hiring our Founding GTM Lead to build the go-to-market motion that gets 21st Agents into the hands of later-stage startups and enterprises shipping AI agents to production.

ICP: Series B+ and F2000 engineering orgs with real products, real security requirements, and real budgets — where leadership has decided agents are strategic, but months are being lost to the exact infrastructure problem we've already solved.

You'll work directly with both founders (Serafim and Sergey). Serafim drives product + community; Sergey drives engineering + infra. Between them, they've shipped Magic MCP, 1Code (5k GitHub stars), and the SDK — and they've never run an enterprise GTM motion. That's you.

If you want a clean territory and a mature playbook, this is not that. If you want to build the motion, close 6-figure ACVs, and define GTM for a category-defining developer infra company, keep reading.

### Two phases

- Phase 1: Sell personally, define the motion. You run discovery, pricing, negotiation, and close strategic deals yourself. You build ICP, pricing, packaging, contracts, pipeline hygiene, forecasting, and decks from scratch.

- Phase 2: Recruit and scale. Once the motion is proven, you hire and develop AEs, BDRs, and Solutions Engineers and set the operating cadence for predictable revenue.

## What you'll do

- Own GTM strategy end-to-end — not just closing. You define ICP, pricing, packaging, outbound, pilot design, and the Scale tier. Sales is the first mile; the motion is the product.

- Own the full sales cycle from first touch to close — prospecting, qualification, discovery, demo, POV, procurement, legal, and close — focused on annual and multi-year subscription contracts at 6-7 figure ACVs.

- Navigate complex, multi-stakeholder buying processes with engineering-led decision makers (VP Eng, Head of AI, Head of Platform, CTO), plus security, compliance, and procurement. Expected deal cycles: 2-6 months.

- Translate technical value into business ROI (sandboxed runtimes, credential proxying, sub-agent orchestration, SSE streaming, VPC deploy) for both champions and economic buyers.

- Design and run lightweight pilots that take a prospect from "interesting" to "production pilot" in under 4 weeks. Coordinate with engineering on Proof-of-Value engagements.

- Build the GTM systems from the ground up — ICP scoring, account research, CRM architecture, outbound sequencing, forecasting. You own the GTM tech stack on day one.

- Use community as a wedge (not a pipeline). A developer starring our repo from a F500 GitHub org is a sales signal. Route those signals into account-based outreach and turn quiet champions into loud ones.

- Partner with founders on enterprise readiness — pricing, packaging, and the Scale tier (on-prem/VPC, SSO, audit logs, budget caps). Feed enterprise requirements into the product roadmap.

- Represent 21st at AI/agent conferences, YC events, and meetups. Build lasting exec relationships with the people deciding how agents get shipped at the best companies.

- Be flexible. Some weeks you're hunting new logos. Others you're troubleshooting a POC with a VP Eng, writing a security one-pager for a CISO, or designing outbound infrastructure from scratch.

## What we're looking for

### Must have

- 3-6+ years closing experience in B2B SaaS, with 2+ years in enterprise or upper mid-market.

- Proven track record of consistent over-achievement (**100%+ quota attainment**) in complex, consultative sales cycles (2-6 months) with $100K+ ACVs.

- Strong technical fluency — you've sold to engineers and can hold your own in a conversation about runtimes, sandboxes, or agent architecture.

- Experience with modern enterprise sales methodologies (MEDDICC, Challenger, Command of the Message) and the discipline to actually use them.

- Comfort owning pricing, packaging, and GTM systems — not just quota.

- Self-motivated, comfortable in ambiguity, wired for speed.

- Entrepreneurial mindset with a bias toward action.

### Nice to have

- Experience selling developer tools, AI/ML platforms, or infrastructure (Vercel, Supabase, Modal, Replicate, Clerk, E2B, Datadog, HashiCorp, MongoDB, Snowflake, Cloudflare, or similar).

- Background selling to VP Eng / Head of AI / CTO.

- Familiarity with bottoms-up adoption funnels and land-and-expand.

- Prior early-stage startup experience (Seed → Series C) and/or first GTM hire.

## Who you are

- Comfortable being in the details longer than you'd like — because that's what building the motion requires.

- You actively experiment with messaging, pricing, and objection handling in live deals and update your approach based on what works.

- You do the unglamorous work like clockwork: metrics, follow-ups, revenue ops, CRM hygiene. If it isn't in HubSpot, it didn't happen.

- High standards, high velocity, low ego.

- You have taste — a cold email from you reads like a technical brief, not a sequence.

## What success looks like (first 6 months)

- Clean, instrumented outbound motion against the top 200 later-stage + enterprise accounts building with Claude Code, Codex, or OpenCode.

- 3-5 named enterprise design partners in active pilots, with clear expansion paths.

- First six-figure ACV contract landed — and we know exactly why it closed.

- Scale tier firmed up enough that we can price and sell it confidently.

- Founders spend less time on pipeline admin and more time in enterprise customer rooms.

## What we offer

- Competitive salary, meaningful equity, accelerator-style compensation with uncapped commission.

- Medical, dental, and vision health insurance.

- Direct daily access to both founders and whichever investor you need to move a deal forward.

- A sharp, low-ego, fast-moving team.

- A rare chance to help define the category of agent infrastructure — with real distribution on day one.

## How we work

In person in SF, Monday–Friday. Some weeks are long, some aren't — but everyone here cares deeply about what we're building and shows up accordingly.

## How to apply

In your application, answer:

1. Walk us through the most technical enterprise deal you've ever closed. What was hard, what did you ship, what did you learn?

2. If you joined tomorrow, what would be the first 10 enterprise accounts you'd reach out to about 21st Agents, and what would the email to the VP Eng say?

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Interview Process

We run a fast, structured process designed to be substantive for you and us. Expect roughly 2 weeks end to end if schedules line up.

1. 15-min intro call with Serafim — mutual fit, your track record, what you're looking for.

2. 1-hour founder interview (Serafim + Sergey) — product, market, motivation. We'll go deep on a past deal and on why enterprise agent infra is interesting to you.

3. GTM exercise (~2 hours, async) — pick 10 target ICP accounts, write the outbound, and walk us through pilot design + champion strategy.

4. Live customer demo / roleplay (60 min) — you sell 21st to us. We'll play champion and economic buyer.

5. Two reference calls — ideally a past manager and a past customer.

6. 3–5 day paid work trial — real accounts, real outbound, real feedback. This is how we both de-risk the hire.

You'll hear from us within 48 hours after each stage. Offer within 48 hours of the trial wrapping.