Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. FirstPrinciples is a research company building AI for scientific discovery. The Founding Account Executive will lead the full sales lifecycle for AI products serving physicists and research organizations, from prospecting and discovery through demonstrations, pilots, and close. The role will also help establish scalable sales processes, manage commercial relationships, and provide market feedback to product, research, and engineering teams.
Responsibilities
- Build relationships and pipeline across commercial R&D teams, industry researchers, research groups, national laboratories, and other personas
- Own the end-to-end commercial lifecycle: from prospecting and qualification, to discovery, demos, proposals, and close
- Conduct thoughtful, targeted outreach to physicists and research leaders, grounded in an understanding of their work and potential needs
- Run technically credible discovery conversations and product demos that connect researchers’ goals to concrete product use cases
- Help prospective customers structure pilot plans, establish success criteria, and build confidence in adopting the platform
- Navigate multiple stakeholders across scientific, technical, administrative, procurement, and leadership functions
- Build lightweight systems for outreach, qualification, account planning, CRM management, follow-up, and forecasting that can scale with the organization
- Work closely with Research Partners to create a strong handoff from commercial agreement to onboarding, successful usage, and long-term adoption
- Bring market feedback, objections, and emerging use cases back to product, research, and engineering
- Own clear pipeline, conversion, and revenue goals while helping define our early sales playbook
Skills
- Strong background in physics or a closely related scientific field (A background in physics, or a related scientific field)
- Genuinely interested in commercial work and motivated by helping scientific products reach the researchers who can benefit from them
- Comfortable initiating conversations, prospecting into new organizations, and building relationships from the ground up
- Able to understand complex research goals and translate technical capabilities into clear, credible value
- Experience in consultative sales, business development, scientific partnerships, solutions consulting, research commercialization, or a similarly customer-facing role
- Strong communicator who can lead discovery conversations, present compelling demonstrations, and move opportunities toward a decision
- Persistent and highly organized, you follow through, maintain momentum, and are comfortable being accountable for measurable commercial outcomes
Benefits
- The opportunity to work on foundational problems at the intersection of AI and physics
- A high-trust, low-bureaucracy environment with real ownership
- Remote-first work with flexibility in how you structure your day
- Exposure to cutting-edge ideas across AI, scientific discovery, and emerging technologies
- A culture that values curiosity, depth of thinking, and first-principles reasoning
- The chance to contribute to work aimed at advancing fundamental science
Company Overview