Founding Account Executive, AI Talent Placement

Founding Account Executive, AI Talent Placement Pursuit | New York City | Full-time | $170,000 base, $275,000–$300,000 OTE You will be the first commercial hire at Pursuit, and you'll carry a personal number and close deals yourself. "Founding" refers to the commercial function you're building, not the organization (Pursuit is twelve years old). About Pursuit Pursuit is a social impact organization building economic mobility in the age of AI. For over a decade we've moved adults from low-income backgrounds, most without college degrees, into high-growth tech careers. Our graduates have generated nearly $1 billion in lifetime wage gains. We also pioneered the Pursuit Bond, an outcomes-based financing model that ties our revenue to the long-term earnings of the people we train. We train what we call Builders: people who complete seven months of immersive training in applied AI — workflow automation, prompt engineering, data pipelines and labeling, junior technical development — and who deliver business value early. About the role Reporting at first directly to the CEO, Pursuit is seeking an entrepreneurial, hands-on Founding Account Executive for our AI Talent Placement team to manage and land placements of Pursuit’s AI Trained builders into full-time roles at a wide range of employer accounts. Your pipeline of ~200 comes from Pursuit’s long-established employer relationships and network. Introductions and first discovery calls land with you, and you own them from that point: qualifying, structuring, closing, and driving the Builder match through to a signed hire. The placement motion is still evolving, so you'll also be expected to learn quickly from the market and rapidly iterate to test and improve the approach over time. As a founding director of sales, you'll have the opportunity to help build from scratch our commercial infrastructure for landing AI-native business roles and help us achieve scale over the next 18 months. What you'll do • Own warm executive introductions end to end, from first conversation through a Builder starting work. • Run consultative discovery to understand a company's business priorities, team gaps, and hiring constraints — including the needs they haven't articulated. • Translate Pursuit talent capabilities into concrete roles, use cases, and business outcomes tailored to each employer- especially when the opportunity is not immediately obvious. • Design the commercial structure for each opportunity. Direct hire, multi-hire cohort, paid apprenticeship or more. Judge what will actually close with this buyer and build it. • Follow up consistently and creatively to keep opportunities moving, navigate objections, and maintain momentum through long or ambiguous sales cycles. • Maintain disciplined pipeline tracking, outreach activity, next steps, and employer records across internal systems. • Share patterns and feedback from employer conversations with the team to continuously improve messaging, targeting, and the placement motion. • Use AI tools to improve prospecting, account research, personalization, follow-up, workflow automation, and relationship management. • Build and run the funnel. Define stages and qualification criteria, keep next steps dated, and hold a forecast you'd stand behind in a weekly review. • Use AI as a force multiplier across research, personalization, follow-up, and account management. About you • 5+ years closing B2B business — sales, business development, strategic partnerships, staffing and recruiting, or professional services. • A track record against a number: quota, placement targets, revenue goals, or comparable measurable outcomes. • Comfortable with an offering that changes shape per account. You've sold something where the answer to "what exactly