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Vals AI is seeking a Founding Head of Partnerships to lead enterprise sales and go-to-market strategy for Vals Smith, an enterprise product that helps large organizations select the right AI model for their use case. The company recently closed a $40M Series A at $400M valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz, with backing from 8VC, Pear VC, Bloomberg, Hudson River Trading, and NextLadder Ventures.
In this founding role, you will own the complete sales cycle for Vals Smith—from outbound prospecting and discovery through technical evaluation, negotiation, close, and expansion. You'll interact directly with senior leaders and decision-makers at large enterprises who are making seven- and eight-figure decisions on AI model selection. The company has strong inbound demand from its launch waitlist and early users, plus warm introductions from founders and investors; you'll also generate cold outbound pipeline.
Key responsibilities include building the go-to-market playbook from scratch: defining ideal customer profile, qualification criteria, outbound sequences, packaging, and objection handling. You'll work closely with the founding PM and engineering team to run technical evaluations and proofs of concept, translating customer feedback into product roadmap priorities and packaging decisions. You'll use data and tooling to continuously monitor impact metrics and optimize strategy.
The ideal candidate has 3+ years of enterprise SaaS or technology sales experience, with proven success closing six-figure deals and managing complex multi-stakeholder sales cycles. You should have recent hands-on outbound prospecting experience, ideally to technical and enterprise personas. While you don't need to code, you must be able to sell technical solutions to product and engineering leaders and translate complex technology into business value. You thrive in early-stage, high-growth environments, building new motions from scratch and iterating rapidly.
The company's founding team includes Stanford PhDs, ex-Jane Street quants, and the first designer at Snorkel, with prior experience at NVIDIA, Meta, Microsoft, Palantir, and HRT. The core methodology comes from NLP evaluation research conducted at Stanford, and the team works with major foundation model labs and some of the world's largest financial institutions and hospital systems.
The role requires in-person presence in San Francisco, with relocation support provided. Compensation includes a highly competitive salary with meaningful equity ownership, relocation and transportation support, full health/dental/vision coverage, lunch and dinner provided, 401K, unlimited PTO, and a $1,500 housing stipend within a one-mile radius.
