Founding Sales Lead

Title: Founding Sales Lead Location: Toronto, ON, Canada, Remote Sapien is building Proof of Quality, an evaluation system for AI work As AI moves from generating answers to doing real work, teams need confidence in the quality of everything their AI systems rely on and produce. AI work includes the data going in, the reasoning in the middle, the outputs coming back, and the decisions and actions agents take. Quality matters at every step. Proof of Quality, or PoQ, measures that work against the customer's own standard. The customer's rubric defines quality. Agents handle the volume. Qualified experts judge what requires judgment. Consensus turns independent assessments into a measure reliable enough to act on. Every evaluation produces a record the customer keeps. Teams can see what passed, what failed, why, and what needs to improve. We've spent two years and 195 million tasks learning how hard it is to measure quality at scale. Now we're hiring our first dedicated sales lead to take PoQ to market. Why now AI made work abundant. Judgment did not scale with it. Models are becoming agents. Agents are moving into production. AI systems increasingly depend on complex data, perform multi-step reasoning, generate open ended work, and make decisions that affect real products and workflows. Some quality can be checked automatically. Much of it depends on context, expertise, or judgment. The answer cannot be to put an expert behind every piece of AI work. Reliable judgment needs a process, and scarce expertise has to be deployed where it actually adds value. That is the problem PoQ is built to solve. You'll join while this market is taking shape, with direct access to the founders, meaningful ownership, and the opportunity to help define how PoQ reaches it. The role You'll own sales end to end: prospecting, discovery, demos, pilots, pricing, negotiation, and close. Sales today is founder led. We've opened the first doors, run the first demos, and learned where PoQ gets the strongest reaction. Your job is to take that baseline and build from it. There is no proven ICP to inherit. We have strong hypotheses and early signals, but we're still mapping the buyers, use cases, segments, and price points where PoQ has the strongest pull. That means you're selling and discovering the market at the same time. Revenue matters. So does signal. Every customer conversation should make us smarter about: who feels the problem most acutely what AI work they need confidence in where quality is easy to test and where judgment becomes necessary what gets them to run a pilot what they will pay which objections repeat what they compare us to where PoQ clearly wins, and where it does not Your job is to run enough good conversations to find those patterns quickly, turn the strongest ones into pilots and revenue, and feed what you learn back into product, pricing, and positioning. This is not a role where you inherit a mature pipeline and execute an established playbook. If you need a locked pitch deck, settled price book, and fixed ICP before you can sell, this is probably the wrong role. If discovering the market while selling into it sounds like the fun part, keep reading. Credibility matters You'll often be selling to technical buyers: AI labs, agent companies, data teams, and engineering leaders. You should be able to run a technical demo yourself, understand the buyer's problem beyond the surface level, and handle the second and third question, not just the first. Your outbound should sound like you understand the company you're writing to. You should know when bringing in a founder or engineer materially improves a deal, and when you should handle it yourself. And you should be comfortable disqualifying quickly when there isn't a real fit. We care more about strong conversations that create real signal and business than a CRM full of polite meetings. Who this is for We care more about what you've actually done than where you've worked. You don't need ten years of enterprise sales or a famous logo on your résumé. You do need evidence that you can create opportunities and close them. You'll likely be a strong fit if you: have personally sourced and closed real business are comfortable selling technical products to technical buyers are excellent at discovery and getting to the real customer problem use AI tools heavily in your daily work think in numbers and patterns work quickly and independently are comfortable operating without a rigid sales playbook can turn customer feedback into useful signal for product and positioning Experience in AI, data, developer tools, infrastructure, or crypto is a strong plus. What you'll own Market discovery Build a steady flow of qualified customer conversations through outbound, networks, communities, and other channels. The goal isn't activity for its own sake. It's enough high quality market contact to learn quickly where PoQ has real pull. Volume matters, but so does relevance. Your outreach should feel informed because it is. Sales, end to end Own the deal from first conversation through discovery, demo, pilot, negotiation, and signed customer. Bring in founders and engineers when they materially improve the deal. Pilots Get strong prospects into useful pilots quickly. PoQ pilots run in days rather than quarters. The rubric, panel, expected effort, and cost are defined up front, and the first Proof Report lands while the decision it informs is still open. You'll help define success, keep pilots moving, and turn successful ones into customers, references, case studies, and expansion opportunities. Pilots are commercial opportunities, but they are also one of the fastest ways for us to learn where PoQ creates the most value. ICP and pricing Treat every conversation as data. Track use cases, objections, pricing reactions, buyer profiles, and why deals move or stall. Use that information to sharpen our ICP, positioning, packaging, and pricing. You'll help decide where PoQ wins, not just sell where you're told. Network Make intelligent use of Sapien's existing network of founders, investors, advisors, partners, and communities. Turn warm introductions into a repeatable channel rather than an advantage spent once. Sales operations Own the CRM, pipeline, forecast, and the systems required to understand what's working. Every stage should be visible. Every meaningful conversion rate should be known. As the motion becomes repeatable, you'll help shape the sales team we build around it. What we look for Proof over polish. Show us deals, pilots, partnerships, or revenue you personally helped create. We want to understand: where the opportunity started what you personally owned what made the deal difficult what the result was what the numbers looked like We also expect: daily fluency with tools like ChatGPT and Claude strong research and prospecting instincts enough technical aptitude to learn PoQ deeply and demo it credibly comfort with modern CRM, sequencing, enrichment, and automation tools a habit of measuring what works and changing what doesn't speed How you'll be measured This role has a scoreboard, but it isn't just revenue. Targets will be set together each quarter and evolve as we learn. They'll fall into four areas: 1. Qualified conversations. Are you consistently creating conversations with companies that have a real reason to buy? 2. Pilots. Are strong prospects moving into structured evaluations of PoQ? 3. Revenue. Are pilots and conversations turning into paying customers? 4. Market signal. Are we learning faster because of the conversations you're running? Are those insights changing who we target, what we build, how we price, or how we position PoQ? If those numbers and signals improve quarter over quarter, you're succeeding. Your first 90 days By the end of your first 90 days, we expect you to have: learned PoQ well enough to sell and demo it independently absorbed the customer conversations and sales work already done launched and iterated on your own outbound motion built a meaningful pipeline of qualified opportunities moved multiple strong prospects toward or into pilots developed an evidence backed view of which segments, buyers, and use cases show the strongest pull made meaningful commercial progress toward a repeatable sales motion We expect speed, but we care more about learning the market correctly than manufacturing activity. How to apply Send us your résumé plus two or three examples of deals or pipelines you actually built. For each, tell us: the starting point the result the timeframe what you personally owned Screenshots of pipelines, sequences, dashboards, or other real work are welcome. Then do one more thing: Pick a company you think should buy Proof of Quality. Tell us why, and write the exact outbound you'd send them. That matters more to us than a polished cover letter.