Head of Sales

TL;DR Harper is entering its next phase of growth, and you'll be on the leadership team driving it. We build technology that is genuinely different: one runtime for data, messaging and compute, running close to the user, built for the real time and AI workloads that older stacks were never designed for. Customers and partners already verified strong product market fit. We need a leader to take it to a much bigger share of the market.

The Head of Sales is Harper's hunter and closer. You'll pick up the phone, open new accounts, and close deals yourself, then build a small team around you. You report to the CEO, remote, with high ownership and a number you carry personally.

You won't inherit a big sales machine or a long playbook. You'll bring your own network, decide where Harper plays first, hire sellers you trust, and write the playbook as you win.

Why Harper

Harper is a distributed application platform that puts data, messaging and compute in one runtime, close to the user. Teams use it to replace stitched together stacks with a single system that is faster, simpler to run, and built for real time and AI driven workloads.

Where Harper is winning today:

• Commerce and digital experience. Retailers use Harper to serve dynamic, personalized pages and to move off legacy front end and back end stacks. Fortune 10 retailers have migrated both layers to Harper, and have replaced incumbent delivery technology with it.
• Real time messaging and IoT. Automotive, telecom and airline customers run MQTT messaging on Harper, with data and messaging in the same system.
• AI and agent workloads. AI applications need fast, shared, durable state and live connections. Harper provides that layer, and customers are already building on it.

Harper also has strong partners and a deep engineering team. You'll arrive at a moment when a new CEO is setting the company's go-to-market direction, and you'll help shape it.

Role Overview

The Head of Sales is Harper's revenue leader -the person who owns the number and the sales motion that produces it. You'll own new business, the pipeline and the committed forecast, and you'll lead how Harper sells through partners. Our go-to-market runs through a growing set of channel and cloud partners, alongside direct enterprise deals. You'll make sure partner relationships turn into qualified opportunities, signed paper, and revenue we can forecast.

You'll work closely with the CEO, Operations (RevOps and deal desk), Finance, Marketing, and our field engineering team, who front much of our technical selling today. You'll lead the Enterprise Account Manager and shape the next sales hires.

We move fast, wear many hats, and value people who flex to get things done. You won't inherit a sales playbook for most things; instead you'll help write it.

Key Responsibilities

New Business

• Build and work a list of named target accounts that fit our ideal customer profile.
• Generate qualified opportunities every quarter against a scorecard agreed with the CEO.
• Lead with Harper's named use-case solutions and bundles, so buyers understand what they're buying and what it costs.
• Run every pilot on standard terms with clear success criteria, and convert pilots to paid.
• Help identify early customers for AI-adjacent workloads as Harper tests that market.

What success looks like: A steady flow of qualified, well-fit opportunities, and pilots that end in signed contracts.

Channel & Partner Revenue

• Partner with our Partnerships lead to turn channel relationships into sourced pipeline and closed deals.
• Co-sell on a joint target account list, and grow revenue from new channel and cloud partners.
• Put deal registration and partner attribution in place so partner-sourced revenue is counted the same way every time.
• Make sure each new partner has signed paper, clear fees and a support model before its pipeline counts.

What success looks like: A growing share of new ARR comes from partners.

Enterprise Accounts & Expansion

• Lead the Enterprise Account Manager, who owns our largest accounts day to day.
• Protect gross revenue retention, and drive expansion through new use cases in existing accounts.

What success looks like: Our anchor customers stay and grow, and the revenue base gets broader every quarter.

Pipeline & Forecast

• Write stage exit criteria for every opportunity stage, and require a close plan and paper path on every deal.
• Run a weekly pipeline review on clean Salesforce data: no default amounts, nothing sitting static for 30+ days.
• Own the committed forecast, and keep one number across Salesforce, the forecast and Finance's operating model.
• Measure stage conversion and win rate, and use closed-lost data to sharpen where we play.

What success looks like: Leadership and the board trust the forecast, and quarterly ARR lands close to what we committed.

Team, Comp & Enablement

• Build the sales team: shape and hire the next revenue roles once you're in seat.
• Design commission plans with Operations and Finance that tie variable pay to company goals.
• Enable the field engineers and solutions team who front deals on discovery, business cases, and running a pilot to a decision.
• Partner with Marketing on sales enablement: one page and one price per solution that a partner rep can sell from.

What success looks like: A small, accountable team that sells the same way, paid on results that matter to the company.

Success in This Role Looks Like

• New business closed, and growing qualified pipeline you created yourself.
• Revenue is diversified across a broader set of customers and partners, and retention holds.
• The committed forecast is one number across sales, finance and the board, and actuals land close to it.
• Pilots run on standard terms and convert to paid contracts.
• New deals land at or above the gross margin target.
• The sales team is hired, enabled and paid on plans tied to company goals.

What This Role Is Not

This role is intentionally different from many traditional sales leadership positions. To ensure clarity and alignment, it is important to understand what this role is not:

• Not a big-company VP of Sales seat. There's no large team underneath you and no established playbook. You'll be in deals yourself while you build the process around them.
• Not a pure channel manager role. Partners are central to how we sell, but you own the revenue outcome, not just the relationships.
• Not a technical pre-sales role. You'll work closely with our engineers and solutions team, but your center of gravity is qualifying, closing and forecasting.
• Not a volume or transactional sales role. We sell considered, enterprise deals with pilots, multiple stakeholders and partner involvement.
• Not a forecast built on hope. We need someone who calls the number honestly and holds the team to clear stages and evidence.

Qualifications

Required

• Enterprise infrastructure software sales (top priority). 10+ years selling enterprise software, with significant time selling databases, data platforms, CDN, cloud or developer infrastructure to large enterprises.
• Sales leadership. 3+ years leading quota-carrying sellers or account managers, including setting quotas and running a forecast.
• Closed deals yourself. You have personally closed new enterprise deals in the last 12 months. This is a player-coach seat.
• A network. Buyers and sellers you can call, and recruit from.
• Channel and partner-led selling. You've closed meaningful revenue with or through partners such as CDNs, hyperscalers, resellers or systems integrators, and you know how attribution and co-selling actually work.
• Forecast discipline. You've worked with sales operations to develop a pipeline review process including qualification criteria, and your committed forecasts have held up.
• Complex deal experience. You've closed six-figure, multi-stakeholder deals with pilots or proofs of concept, including usage- or consumption-based pricing.
• Commercial and pricing judgment. You understand deal economics and gross margin, and you hold a price floor.
• Comfort with ambiguity and ownership. You thrive in fast-moving, early-stage environments and hold yourself accountable for outcomes.
• Excellent communication skills. You can sell to technical and business buyers, and you can give the CEO and board a clear, honest view of the number.

Preferred

• Experience selling with or through Akamai, Fastly, AWS, GCP or a global systems integrator.
• Experience selling to large retail and commerce companies, where speed and data freshness drive revenue.
• Experience building a sales function at a venture- or PE-backed company, including the first commission plans.
• Experience with edge computing, real-time data, or caching and data delivery solutions.

Nice to Have

• Hands-on experience with Salesforce and HubSpot.
• Familiarity with AI and agent workloads, and the infrastructure behind them.
• Fluency with AI tools to speed up research, account planning and forecasting.

Tools We Use

Salesforce, HubSpot, Google Workspace, Slack, Zoom.

Why This Role Matters at Harper

The Head of Sales is how Harper turns a strong platform and strong partnerships into revenue it can count on. Our 2027 plan bets on a repeatable revenue engine in edge commerce, a broader set of partners, and profitable growth on every new dollar. This role owns the heart of that bet: a pipeline we can forecast, partners who source real deals, and a team that sells the same way every time. As Harper scales through partnerships and enterprise growth, strong sales leadership is what lets us grow with confidence.

Compensation

• Base: $225,000–$325,000
• On-target earnings (base plus variable): $375,000–$540,000 at a 60/40 base-to-variable split. Variable is tied to new business closed against the committed number.