Founding Account Executive - Lithos Ai
CA · HybridFull-timePosted todayStill listed today
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At a glance
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Job overview
Lithos builds an inference engine for frontier open models on standard GPUs and serves startups and large enterprises through an API or on customer hardware. The Founding Account Executive will run early enterprise deals end to end, develop the company’s sales playbook, and relay customer feedback to the founding team. This is an individual-contributor role and one of the company’s first ten hires.
Skills & qualifications
Skills
Qualifications
Full job description
About Lithos
Lithos builds the fastest agentic inference on the planet: frontier open models at full precision on standard GPUs. Our engine currently holds top spots on Artificial Analysis for output speed, time to first token and end-to-end latency. We serve inference to growing startups as well as FT500 companies through a public API or on their own hardware.
Lithos was founded by Carnegie Mellon computer science professors who spent years turning systems research into a product. We are a small team, and this is one of our first ten hires.
Why this role matters
We have serious enterprise interest from well-known, AI-forward companies, and we need someone to turn it into revenue.
This is deliberately an individual contributor role. We don't yet know our repeatable sales motion well enough for anyone to build a team around it. We need one great seller who can run our first enterprise deals end to end, close them, and tell us what actually wins. What you learn becomes the playbook the rest of our sales organization is built on.
What you'll do
• Own our first enterprise deals from start to finish. Take active opportunities with large, AI-forward companies from technical evaluation through pilot, pricing, procurement and signature.
• Run technical sales without a big support team. Work directly with the founders and engineers to scope pilots, define success criteria and prove our speed advantage on the customer's own workloads.
• Build pipeline. Find and open new accounts with companies building AI agents and customer-facing AI features where speed matters.
• Write the playbook. Document who buys, why they buy, what objections come up, how pricing lands and how long deals take. Bring the founders clear, honest answers about what closes and what doesn't.
• Shape the product and pricing. Bring customer feedback straight to the founding team and help decide what we build and how we charge for it.
What we're looking for
• 5+ years of closing complex, technical enterprise deals, ideally in AI infrastructure, cloud, developer platforms or data infrastructure.
• A track record of closing six- and seven-figure deals with technical buyers, and the ability to walk through exactly how you won them.
• Experience as an early or founding sales hire at a startup, where you built the process instead of following one.
• Comfortable going deep on technical conversations with engineering leaders, and fast at learning what you don't know.
• You want to stay hands-on. You're motivated by closing deals and building something new, not by managing a team right away.
• Nice to have: you have sold usage-based or consumption pricing, GPU or cloud capacity, or AI and ML tooling.
How this job compares
Set against the 11,687 open Account Executive jobs on Olive Jobs, counted November 5, 2026.
- Pay
- This postingNot listed
- California median$130–188K/yr1,228 salary ranges
- California median$32–50/hr22 hourly ranges
- Openings
- Olive Jobs lists 1,534 open Account Executive jobs in California and 11,687 across the US. 16% of them nationwide are listed as remote or flexible.
- Experience
- This posting asks for at least 5 years of experience; Account Executive postings that state a minimum ask for 5 years at the median (8,963 postings).
- Education
- 1,767 of the 11,687 open Account Executive jobs (15%) ask for a bachelor's degree or higher.
Counted across the open, public US postings on Olive Jobs on November 5, 2026. Pay medians are the middle values of the low ends and of the high ends of postings that list both ends of a range in the same cadence (a yearly salary or an hourly rate); a range's midpoint is halfway between its ends. Pay and experience figures resting on fewer than 20 postings are left out.
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