Senior Account Executive, SonarSource
AI Sales Specialist
More information about location
Code quality management platform
Be an early applicant
Code quality management platform
501-1000 employees
Be an early applicant
More information about location
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To enable developers and development teams to write clean code and remediate existing code organically, so that they can focus on the work they love and maximize the value they generate for businesses.
Role
Who you are
- You are a technical seller who genuinely cares about developers
- You've sold to engineering buyers before — ideally at a dev tools, DevOps, code intelligence, security, or AI infrastructure company — and you know how to navigate a sale that begins bottoms-up and lands at the CTO's desk
- You're equally comfortable whiteboarding a CI pipeline with a staff engineer and presenting an ROI model to a CFO
- You read AI Twitter / X, you know the difference between Cursor and Copilot, and you have informed opinions about where AI coding agents are headed
- You're energized by the pace of an early team, you take ownership without being asked, and you'd rather be in the room than on Zoom
- You can close a PLG-converted deal in two weeks and a strategic platform deal in six months, and you bring the same professionalism to both
- You do not treat small or mid-market deals as below you — you understand that velocity across the full deal-size spectrum is what builds a healthy book and a strong commission
- You are as comfortable running a high-volume sequence in Outreach as you are preparing a board-level ROI story
- 5–8+ years of full-cycle, quota-carrying SaaS sales experience
- 3+ years selling technical products to engineering, DevOps, platform, or security buyers
- Documented track record of consistent quota attainment (President's Club or equivalent is a strong plus)
- Multiple six-figure ACV deals closed in the last 24 months, ideally including at least one seven-figure deal
- Hands-on experience running developer-led / PLG-to-enterprise sales motions where bottoms-up usage data shapes the buying committee
- Fluent enough in modern software development — Git, CI/CD, code review workflows, SDLC tooling — to lead a technical conversation without an SE in the room when you have to
- Based in the San Francisco Bay Area; willing to be in our San Mateo HQ multiple days per week and physically present with customers across SF, Palo Alto, Mountain View, and the Peninsula
- Experience running velocity plays or shorter-cycle inside-sales motions in addition to strategic enterprise selling — comfortable managing higher deal volume, a mix of deal sizes, and PLG-sourced pipeline that moves faster than a traditional enterprise cycle
- Proficient with inside-sales tooling: Salesforce (SFDC), Outreach or Salesloft, Gong or Chorus. Knows how to run sequencing, track stage-conversion metrics, and manage CRM hygiene without being asked
What the job involves
- You will be one of the founding Senior Account Executives on Sonar's AI Sales Specialist team
- You'll own a named-account territory of AI-native startups (Series A–C) and digital-native unicorns headquartered in the Bay Area, building pipeline, running developer-led evaluations, and closing six- and seven-figure deals with VPs of Engineering, Heads of Platform/DevEx, and CTOs
- This is a full-cycle, high-velocity role inside a category-defining platform
- You'll be expected to spend real time in-person with customers — at their offices, at meetups, at our San Mateo office — because the buyers you're selling to value being met where they are
- You'll work hand-in-hand with Sonar Solutions Engineering, Developer Advocacy, Product, and Marketing to turn bottom-up developer adoption into expansion-ready enterprise relationships across the Sonar platform
- You are expected to run both: strategic multi-threaded enterprise engagements with CTOs and VPs of Engineering, and shorter-cycle inside-sales-style closes on PLG-sourced opportunities where the product has already done the heavy lifting. The expectation is velocity where the deal allows it, and depth where the deal demands it
- Own the entire revenue cycle for your named-account territory: prospecting, technical discovery (with SEs), multi-threaded executive engagement, POV management, commercial negotiation, and close
- Generate the majority of your own pipeline through targeted outbound, ecosystem relationships, and in-person presence across the Bay Area
- Partner with Developer Advocacy and Marketing to convert PLG signal — workspace signups, evaluation activity, GitHub installs — into qualified enterprise opportunities
- Design tailored land-and-expand motions that start from the developer experience and ladder up to platform-wide deals
- Build durable relationships with engineering leaders in the Bay Area AI ecosystem and bring their feedback back into Product to shape the roadmap
- Help us hire, ramp, and shape the culture of the AI Sales Specialist team as we scale
- Convert product-qualified leads (PQLs) — workspace signups, trial activity, GitHub installs — into closed revenue efficiently. For PLG-sourced opportunities where the product has done the qualification work, the expectation is a short-cycle close without over-engineering the process
- Manage a mixed book simultaneously: multi-threaded strategic deals and higher-velocity inside-sales-style closes. Know when to invest deeply in a deal and when to accelerate a decision
- Maintain rigorous CRM hygiene in Salesforce and run structured outreach sequences via Outreach or Salesloft. Be comfortable being measured on pipeline velocity metrics — time-to-first-meeting, time-to-close, stage-conversion rate — alongside ACV
Application process
- All offers of employment at Sonar are contingent upon the results of a comprehensive background check and reference verification conducted before the start date
Our take
It has been reported that bug-prone software costs enterprises close to $3T every year, and with developers now handling higher volumes of code than ever, SonarSource’s products automatically ensure that only clean code is embedded when they update software.
The company was founded in Switzerland in 2008, and has become a market leading platform for code quality control. While its first decade was encouraging, the period from 2018 and today has been an astounding period of hyper growth.
It has earned Unicorn status, opened up offices across Europe, as well as in the US and Asia, and counts the likes of NASA, Microsoft, and IBM amongst its customer base. Indeed, the vast majority of the Fortune 100 use SonarSource.
With its position at the head of the market established, SonarSource is aiming to expand its headcount and continue its momentum, especially in the US and Asia-Pacific, where the tech industry is booming
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
39% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (2 rounds)
Apr 2022
$412m
LATE VC
Nov 2016
$47.6m
LATE VC
Total funding: $459.6m
Company HQ
Vernier, GE
Leadership
Tariq Shaukat
(CEO)Previously a President and Advisor to the CEO/Board of Directors at Bumble. He also spent 4 years at Google as the President of Google Cloud and 4 years at Caesars Entertainment as CCO.
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