Head of Sales (San Francisco)

Lakera AI • Full-time • San Francisco, California, USA • 6d ago

The Role

As the Head of Sales, you will be the critical force in strategizing and securing net-new revenue to support Lakera’s continued growth. The Head of Sales will build a world-class go-to-market motion, foster a high-performance culture, and partner with executive leadership to establish Lakera as the industry standard intelligent compute security platform. This individual will hire, develop and retain a strong sales team that will continue to capitalize on their strong enterprise inbound interest while continuing to land net-new customers. This hire is a top priority for Lakera for 2025 and beyond.

About Lakera

Lakera is on a mission to ensure AI does what we want it to do. We are heading towards a future where AI agents run our businesses and personal lives. Here at Lakera, we're not just dreaming about the future; we're building the security foundation for it. We empower security teams and builders so that their businesses can adopt AI technologies and unleash the next phase of intelligent computing.

We work with Fortune 500 companies, startups, and foundation model providers to protect them and their users from adversarial misalignment. We are also the company behind Gandalf, the world’s most popular AI security game.

Lakera has offices in San Francisco and Zurich.

We move fast and work with intensity. We act as one team but expect everyone to take substantial ownership and accountability. We prioritize transparency at every level and are committed to always raising the bar in everything we do. We promote diversity of thought as we believe that creates the best outcomes.

Role Responsibilities

Strategy: Define, develop, and execute a consistent and scalable sales strategy that appeals to CISOs and enterprise security teams.
Revenue Growth Ownership: Own the company’s overall revenue targets, capitalize on inbound leads, and identify new revenue opportunities to scale Lakera’s revenue.
Customer Focus: Build deep relationships with customers and align the sales strategy with customer needs.
Sales Enablement and Tools: Implement and manage the right sales enablement tools, CRM systems, and analytics to ensure that the growing sales team leverages data to operate efficiently.
Market Insights and Competitive Intelligence: Lead market analysis efforts to understand trends, competitor strategies, and industry dynamics. Refine Lakera’s sales strategy to be well-positioned for market demands.
Team Development: Attract top-tier talent and create a performance-oriented culture that also provides coaching and training to maximize the sales teams potential.
Budget: Prepare necessary plans for budget, revenue forecasts, personnel, capital expenditures, and operating costs that ensures all go-to-market strategy initiatives have high ROI.
Cross-functional: Cultivate relationships with post-sales, marketing, product, and engineering. Provide customer feedback to all functions to ensure Lakera’s collective success.

Qualifications

5+ years of sales leadership experience, 10+ years of experience working in sales with a technical product.
Proven track record of driving significant revenue growth in early-stage B2B SaaS companies, ideally in the cybersecurity space.
Expertise in selling products to technical buyers, preferably CISOs, in enterprise companies.
Demonstrated success in building, scaling, and leading high-performing sales teams beyond 15 team members, with a hands-on approach in both team leadership and individual deal closing.
Ability to navigate and influence C-suite executives, both internally and with customers.
Track record of closing large 6 and 7-figure deals.
The ability to translate non-technical market feedback into concrete engineering, marketing, and product plans.
Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work cross-functionally at all levels of the organization.

Location: San Francisco.

Logistics: Hybrid with 2 days/ week in the office. We’re excited about candidates who want to contribute to our in-office culture.

Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

Compensation and Benefits: Our total compensation package is a blend of salary, equity and benefits.

We are committed to paying fairly and aim for these three elements collectively to be highly competitive with market rates. Equity - On top of this position's compensation, equity will be a major component of the total compensation. We aim to offer higher-than-average equity compensation for a company of our size and communicate equity amounts at the time of offer issuance.

Benefits: