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Salary: USD 175,000 - 215,000 / annual
SambaNova Systems is hiring a Sales Director, Enterprise to build and drive a large book of business across US financial services institutions. You will report directly to the VP of Americas and own the number for the financial services segment—global banks, capital markets firms, asset managers, and insurers. This is a senior, relationship-driven role for a seller already trusted at the executive level in this industry.
You will own the financial services number and build the book of business across US financial institutions, carrying both the quota and account strategy. You will sell high and wide, opening and cultivating relationships with CIOs, CTOs, heads of AI/ML, and line-of-business executives. Deals in this segment are won in the executive suite and defended in architecture reviews—you operate credibly in both.
You will run full pursuits end to end with high touch: qualify rigorously, map the buying committee (technology, risk, procurement, finance), build the win plan, and personally drive every stage from discovery through commercial close. You will navigate large financial institutions, understanding how they actually adopt technology—model risk management, information security review, vendor risk, data residency, and regulatory posture. You will anticipate these gates and build them into the deal plan rather than discovering them late.
You will position on-premises AI deployment in terms the institution's economics: cost versus public cloud consumption at production scale, data control, latency, and the ability to run frontier open-source models inside their own walls. You will lead the pursuit team, partnering with Solutions Architects on technical validation and POCs, and orchestrating SambaNova executives into accounts deliberately and at the right altitude.
You will build the segment playbook—define the repeatable financial services motion with use cases, references, and deal constructs—and lay the foundation for the enterprise team as it scales, with the opportunity to lead it. You will forecast with discipline, owning pipeline integrity and forecast accuracy for the segment, and bring structured market and competitive intelligence back to sales and product leadership.
SambaNova is a leader in next-generation AI infrastructure, delivering a full-stack inference platform. At the core is the RDU (Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit)—a chip built on dataflow architecture rather than traditional GPU model. Its decode performance is especially strong for agentic workloads like multi-turn agents, code generation, and long-running applications. RDUs are packaged into SambaRack, rack-scale hardware that lets customers deploy state-of-the-art models with better performance, greater energy efficiency, and faster time to value.
**Requirements:**
- 10+ years of quota-carrying enterprise technology sales with a substantial track record selling into US financial services (banks, capital markets, asset management, or insurance), including large, complex infrastructure or platform deals.
- Established senior relationships in the sector: ability to open doors at the CIO/CTO and head-of-AI level at major institutions today, not build toward them.
- Command of long-cycle, multi-stakeholder enterprise pursuits—technology, risk, compliance, procurement, and executive sponsors in parallel—with deal values in the seven to eight figures.
- Working fluency in AI and data center infrastructure: how enterprises evaluate compute, where inference workloads are heading, and the tradeoffs between public cloud, private deployment, and hybrid.
- Familiarity with the governance realities of financial institutions—model risk, information security review, vendor onboarding—and a record of getting deals through them.
- Executive presence: represent the company credibly with C-level customers and partner naturally with company executives in strategic pursuits.
**Nice-to-haves:**
- Existing relationships across multiple top-20 US financial institutions.
- Experience selling AI infrastructure, accelerated compute, or on-premises platforms into regulated industries.
- Experience displacing or selling against public cloud consumption with an on-premises or hybrid economic case.
- Track record of landing a new vendor inside a major bank—first deal through vendor risk, then expansion.
- History of building or leading an enterprise segment as it scaled.
