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Sierra is the leading platform for customer-facing AI agents, serving major brands including The GAP, Rocket Mortgage, SoFi, Sutter Health, and SoftBank. The company recently achieved FedRAMP High certification and secured its first federal agency contract. Sierra is now building its founding public sector team to transform how government serves citizens and engages with constituents.
As Area Vice President of Public Sector, you will build and lead Sierra's public sector sales organization from the ground up. You will recruit, develop, and mentor a team of account executives focused on strategic federal, state, and local government accounts, setting clear expectations and fostering a culture of customer obsession and accountability.
Key responsibilities include:
- Owning revenue growth and territory strategy: translating public sector ambitions into territory coverage, account priorities, pipeline goals, and revenue plans while maintaining rigorous forecasts and driving consistent achievement of targets.
- Creating opportunities around mission outcomes: building executive relationships with agency leaders and coaching your team to translate priorities such as constituent access, service delivery, workforce effectiveness, and program integrity into compelling AI agent opportunities. You will serve as executive sponsor for strategic accounts.
- Guiding complex sales cycles: coaching account executives through long, multi-stakeholder government buying processes and engaging directly at critical moments. You will mobilize cross-functional support for executive alignment, solution development, business cases, security and legal reviews, pricing, proposal strategy, negotiation, and close.
- Shaping acquisition and capture strategy: ensuring every priority opportunity has a credible path to contract and a disciplined capture plan. You will help the team navigate funding, fiscal-year timing, competitive dynamics, and procurement pathways including GSA schedules, GWACs, IDIQs, BPAs, state schedules, and cooperative purchasing agreements.
- Scaling Sierra's partner ecosystem: partnering with public sector and partnerships leadership to build productive relationships with prime contractors, systems integrators, resellers, distributors, small-business partners, and technology providers. You will guide decisions about direct sales, subcontracting, teaming, and partner-led transactions.
- Leading strategic prime and teaming relationships: establishing executive alignment with key partners and shaping account ownership, deal registration, workshare, and joint go-to-market plans.
- Driving disciplined pursuit and proposal decisions: partnering with the Public Sector GM on bid/no-bid recommendations and prioritizing resources across strategic pursuits.
- Staying accountable for customer success: building trust with senior agency leaders, establishing strong handoffs from sales to delivery, and remaining engaged through deployment and expansion.
- Building a repeatable public sector go-to-market motion: refining account segmentation, hiring and capacity plans, capture processes, partner strategy, contract-vehicle priorities, and sales playbooks.
- Leading an AI-native sales organization: embedding AI into how the team researches accounts, develops outreach, synthesizes calls, plans opportunities, creates proposals, and forecasts.
Sierra is guided by core values: Trust, Customer Obsession, Craftsmanship, Intensity, and Family. The company is primarily in-person based in San Francisco with growing offices across North America, Europe, and Asia. Co-founders include Bret Taylor (Board Chair of OpenAI, former co-CEO of Salesforce, former CTO of Facebook) and Clay Bavor (18 years at Google, led Google Labs and Project Starline).
REQUIREMENTS:
- 15+ years of enterprise customer-facing sales experience, specifically selling to the U.S. government
- 10+ years managing, mentoring, and developing a high-performing enterprise sales team
- Demonstrated experience running and managing end-to-end complex deals ($1M+)
- Strong fluency in government acquisition and procurement, including funding and budget cycles, competitive solicitations, proposal processes, task orders, and common Federal or state contract vehicles
- Experience developing and executing capture strategies before a solicitation is released
- Strong network and demonstrated ability to work with government technology partners, including prime contractors, systems integrators, resellers, distributors, and small-business teaming partners
- Sound judgment about direct, channel, prime/subcontractor, and teaming models
- Ability to build credibility with agency executives, program leaders, contracting and procurement officials, security teams, and technical stakeholders
- Excellent executive communication, negotiation, account planning, and forecasting skills with rigor about details, procurement milestones, and next steps
- Passion for public sector work and belief in the potential of government institutions to improve outcomes
- Comfort operating with high ownership in an early-stage business; ability to create structure, move with urgency, and collaborate across functions
