Founding Account Executive
OpenReq · New York, USA ·
- Employment
- Contract
- Category
- Sales
- Experience
- 2+ years
About HelmGuard
We're building agent-native risk infrastructure: risk management and trust building, delivered by AI agents, for a world increasingly run by them. As more decisions and transactions run through agents, the volume of risk to manage and trust to establish is growing very fast. Today both functions are fragmented, split across internal teams, point products, and outside consultants, and rebuilt from scratch whenever someone needs an answer. HelmGuard brings them onto one platform and runs them continuously: our agents sit on top of proprietary data and reassess as conditions change, rather than at fixed checkpoints. So our customers spend their time deciding and acting on what matters, not assembling the evidence to get there.
Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent across risk management and trust building annually. These funds are going to be reallocated to agent-native solutions in the next five years, and we will capture that spend.
We've grown to seven-figure revenue within months of product launch, on the back of multi-year contracts with leading enterprises in financial services, regulated technology, and healthcare. Our founders come from Palantir and academic institutions: Oxford, Stanford, and ETH. We're backed by leading UK and US institutional investors and exceptional angels from Meta, Isomorphic Labs, Palantir, SpaceXAI, and more.
We're hiring across founding-team roles for people who want outsize impact, the influence over direction and culture that comes only from joining this early, and pre-Series A equity upside.
Your Impact
Our CEO is running founder-led sales, and it's working: seven-figure revenue within months of launch, multi-year enterprise contracts. The constraint now isn't demand, it's bandwidth. You take the weight of running those deals off the CEO's plate: the pipeline, the prep, the process, the follow-through that turns a great founder conversation into a signed contract. Within your first 6–12 months, you're our first full-cycle AE carrying your own quota and the sales playbook the company scales on is the one you helped write.
The Role
You join as the commercial right hand to the CEO, in lockstep on every deal. He brings the founder story and closes; you own everything around it including account mapping and meeting prep, driving next steps between meetings, multi-threading into accounts, keeping dozens of live opportunities moving without anything slipping. You also own what doesn't get founder headspace today: stepping back across a week of calls to work out what's consistently winning and what isn't, and turning that into how we sell.
Alongside the warm pipeline, you get a blank calendar and a mandate: figure out our cold motion. There's no marketing team, no BDRs, no leads being fed to you and there won't be for a while. If your first instinct on "you're handed a quota and zero support, what do you do?" is to start listing experiments, this is your job.
This is an apprenticeship with a sharp edge: learn the craft alongside the founder, and once you've earned it, the deals are yours. The expectation is that within your first 6–12 months you're running full cycles on your own quota, with the CEO as escalation point rather than deal lead. This is explicitly a selling career path — not ops and not chief of staff.
Our buyers are CISOs, VPs of Risk, and heads of compliance at large enterprises. The product is agentic AI sold into regulated industries so deals necessarily involve security reviews, procurement, legal, and committee decisions. You should find that terrain energising, not exhausting.
What You Will Do
- Run the machinery of CEO-led deals: account research, meeting prep, stakeholder maps, mutual action plans, follow-ups, and the async cadence that keeps enterprise deals alive between meetings
- Generate pipeline from scratch: build and test our outbound motion, work warm investor introductions well, and treat top of funnel as your number one job
- Multi-thread into accounts: find the second and third stakeholder, get buy-in beyond the champion, and spot which deals need it
- Run the retro loop the CEO doesn't have headspace for: across a week of calls, what's consistently working, what's failing, and what we change
- Work AI-native: agents do the prep grunt work; your judgment refines and applies it (this is how the whole company operates)
- Progressively take deals end to end yourself, graduating to your own quota as trust builds
- Write the playbook as you go, including qualification, deal stages, and objection handling so the next hire ramps in weeks, not quarters
What You Bring
- 2–5 years in a high-performance commercial seat: a BDR or seller in a strong B2B software sales org who's learned the craft or a VC/banking analyst who's been running exec processes and wants operating experience with real ownership
- Full-cycle closing experience
- Proof you can generate, not just manage: you've sourced your own pipeline or run your own processes without marketing or a team feeding you and you can walk us through exactly how you did that
- The "no leads, no excuses" mindset: handed a quota and zero support, you start running experiments, not waiting for enablement
- Process discipline so you can keep dozens of threads moving through structure, not memory, and nothing falls through the cracks
- Polish and credibility with senior executives: our buyers are CISOs and VPs at large enterprises, and you'll be in those rooms from week one
- Genuine excitement about figuring it out: our sales motion is a problem to be solved, not a system to be operated; much of what we try won't work, and that should energise you
- High agency and hard work: founding-stage means the gap is yours to close
Nice to have
- Experience selling security, GRC, compliance, or technical products to enterprise buyers
- Time at an early-stage company, or alongside founder-led sales
- Already using AI agents in your daily workflow for research, prep, and writing
Culture and Values
We value a diversity of perspectives and experiences. We also hold a small set of core beliefs that reflect how we operate, and share them transparently with candidates so the fit is clear from the outset.
Put Customers First. Our customers buy outcomes from us, not features. We judge every decision by whether it delivers on that promise.
Take Ownership. Founding-stage means problems don't come pre-scoped. You see something that needs doing, scope it, ship it, own the outcome. We expect this from everyone, and provide you the backing to execute on it.
Work Hard, With Gratitude. This is the most consequential window for building enterprise software in a generation. We work hard because the opportunity is rare, and we do it with gratitude for the moment, for the people we get to build it with, and for the customers willing to bet on us this early.
Say the Silly Thing. The best ideas usually start out sounding half-baked, so we'd rather you say the silly thing than sit on it. We want you opinionated and willing to argue, and just as willing to change your mind when someone makes a better case. Disagreement here is a contribution, not a risk.
Working at HelmGuard
Location. King's Cross, London (Gridiron building). We're built around in-person collaboration and expect most days to be in-office, with flexibility for the days that need it.
Compensation. Top decile for the London market — competitive base plus commission, with meaningful EMI-eligible options.
Perks. Daily team lunch and specialty coffee, a roof terrace overlooking King's Cross, on-site showers for those who enjoy active commuting, and serious per-person AI tooling and API budgets.
Interview process. Three stages: behavioural phone screen, commercial-technical phone screen, and a paid on-site work trial. Target turnaround is under two weeks from first conversation.