Founding Account Executive

About Artos:

At Artos, we build tools that help biopharma companies create and manage their R&D documentation in a fraction of the time. If you’re looking to join a team whose mission is to fundamentally change the way that drug development gets done, we’d love to talk to you.

The Role:

We are hiring Artos’s first dedicated salesperson.

This is not a traditional Senior Account Executive role. You will not inherit a mature sales organization, established commission culture, or finished playbook. You will help build them.

The role is approximately:

• 60% selling: Own opportunities from pipeline creation through close.

• 25% system-building: Develop the sales process, messaging, qualification standards, and playbook for future hires.

• 15% pricing and strategy: Partner with the founders on pricing, packaging, segmentation, and go-to-market strategy.

We are looking for an architect-minded seller—someone who can close revenue now while building the foundation for Account Executives two, three, and four.

What You’ll Do:

• Own the full sales cycle across enterprise and mid-market life sciences accounts.

• Generate your own pipeline while working inbound and founder-generated opportunities.

• Run discovery, product evaluations, business-case development, procurement, negotiation, and close.

• Build credibility with regulatory, medical, scientific, operational, and executive stakeholders.

• Sell a new category to evidence-driven buyers who are appropriately skeptical of AI claims.

• Compete effectively against internal development and consultancy-led alternatives by communicating total cost, maintenance burden, implementation risk, and speed to value.

• Multi-thread relationships across each account so opportunities are not dependent on a single champion.

• Build and document Artos’s sales playbook, including messaging, qualification, objection handling, stage definitions, forecasting, and CRM practices.

• Help shape pricing, packaging, pilot structures, and the transition from founder-led selling to a scalable sales organization.

• Protect customer outcomes by refusing to sell commitments Artos cannot successfully deploy.

What We’re Looking For:

• Experience personally owning and closing complex enterprise deals, ideally $250,000+ in annual contract value with four- to twelve-month sales cycles.

• Experience selling a new product, category, or technical approach into a skeptical market.

• A track record of personally sourcing pipeline, not only closing opportunities generated by others.

• Experience selling into life sciences, healthcare, or another highly regulated industry.

• Credibility with scientific, regulatory, and risk-conscious buyers.

• A builder’s mindset and evidence that you have created sales processes, messaging, playbooks, or operating systems—not just followed them.

• Strong CRM discipline, honest qualification, and forecasts you can defend.

• Consultative selling skills and the ability to communicate with executives, functional leaders, technical teams, and procurement.

• Multi-threading as a natural part of how you manage accounts.

• Comfort working closely with founders in active sales opportunities.

• Willingness to remain highly hands-on rather than immediately moving into management.

Helpful, but Not Required:

• Experience selling AI, machine learning, data, or other technically complex products.

• Familiarity with regulatory operations, medical writing, clinical, quality, or submission-related workflows.

• Experience selling both enterprise and mid-market offerings.

• Experience as the first or second seller at an early-stage startup.

• Experience hiring or mentoring other sellers.

• An established network within pharmaceutical or biotechnology companies.

Why Artos:

You will have direct influence over revenue, pricing, product strategy, customer experience, and the future sales organization.

This is an opportunity to do more than carry a number. You will help define how Artos brings a new category of technology to life sciences and build the commercial foundation the company will scale from.

Other Information:

Very comfortable working in a fast-paced and intense startup environment

Willing to work in-person in our office in Mission Bay 4-5 days/week

Likes matcha KitKats, believes every LLM prompt is just Schrödinger’s cat waiting to be observed, and knows too many random facts about the Mongol postal system