Founding Account Executive

**Here's the tl;dr**:

- ** We are on a mission** to make programming biology easy. We provide biologists with the software, machine learning & services to discover, design and optimise enzymes and their cell-factories to ultimately produce almost anything.
- We're an **experienced team**. We have built many successful products before and we have raised enough funds to have plenty of runway for the years to come
- We're focused on building the **best possible team culture**. We're distributed across two locations, and are flexible about when and where we work.
- We offer **top of the market** salary, a generous equity stake in the company and a wide range of benefits from health and wellbeing, financial, to training and career progression opportunities.

**This is Cradle**:
Cradle helps teams to engineer proteins with fewer, more successful experiments. We use generative machine learning models, accessible through user-friendly software interfaces, to help engineer protein properties such as stability, expression, activity, binding affinity and specificity. We are bridge builders who bring together the best of machine learning, synthetic biology, developer tools, and user experience design. Our mission is to enable a world where most of the products around us can be easily made and degraded biologically using a cell-factory instead of (petro-)chemicals, plants or animal agriculture.

**Summary**

As our Founding Account Executive and first commercial hire at Cradle, you will work alongside our founders to scale an early stage business. You will be joining us at an exciting time where we landed our first set of customers and are getting ready to scale the product, helping biologists across the world to develop better proteins using advanced Machine Learning tools.

You will be the engine for our revenue growth, learning how to take a product to market and scale to millions of annual recurring revenue. You’ll build and manage our sales pipeline, close deals with world-leading biotech organizations, and partner with our founders on our go-to-market (GTM) strategy as we expand our ideal customer profile and find success across verticals and geographies. The feedback and strategic insights that you gather from speaking directly to prospective customers will help to steer our roadmap.

You’ll work closely alongside Cradle’s product, engineering, and customer success teams to craft custom proposals for top accounts. You’ll network with scientists and executives in global biotech and pharma, attend events across the world, and become well-known in this space. In a team that is thinking big and expanding rapidly, there are no limits with this role; you are a future commercial leader.

**Responsibilities**
- Develop and manage our sales pipeline, close deals, and partner with our founders on GTM strategy as we expand our customer base and find success across verticals and geographies.
- Navigate complex sales cycles with the world’s leading enterprise biotech and pharma companies (300-8,000 employees), securing six to seven figure deals.
- Build our sales processes from the ground up You will craft everything from CRM, sales decks, communication, outbounding strategies, to (variable) compensation. You'll roll up your sleeves and proactively take on what needs to be done.
- Cultivate relationships with everyone from scientists to C-level, gaining an understanding of their needs and decision making process.

**Need to haves**
- 7+ years of experience in an (enterprise SaaS) B2B sales role, or similar.
- Proven track record of consistently exceeding sales quota.
- Strong negotiation skills and demonstrated ability to close large deals.
- Excellent project management skills. You have successfully managed projects across multiple internal and external teams in a complex, global environment.
- Proven track record of cultivating C-suite relationships across industries. You learn to speak their language, and have the gravitas to quickly gain executive credibility, understand organizational political dynamics and develop competitive awareness.
- Exceptional analytical skills. Cradle is building a complex product at the interface of protein engineering and machine learning. This does not intimidate you, as you have previously shown to rapidly understand and articulate complex technical concepts, and translate them into industry
- or business-relevant terms.
- Outstanding verbal and written communicator. You craft beautiful presentations, write with ease and clarity, and tailor delivery to the audience.
- You listen intently, are innately curious, and learn with humility.
- You are a team player who thrives in a fast-paced and ambiguous environment.

**Nice to haves**
- Domain knowledge of biotechnology or machine learning.
- Prior experience at a (B2B) growth-stage startup.
- Strong business network in global biotech and pharma.

**Cradle helps biologists design improved proteins in record time using powerful predi