Founding Account Executive (Product - Watcher)
About the role
THE OPPORTUNITY
We are building Watcher, a coding agent security product. Watcher is deployed in production and monitors billions of agent tokens per month across engineering teams at agent-building scale-ups and multinational enterprises.
We are hiring our founding Account Executive. You will own the full sales cycle end to end and build the playbook the rest of the GTM team runs on.
Our best conversations often start from a high-value interaction: an introduction from an investor, advisor or customer, a conference panel, a roundtable, the security communities our buyers already belong to, or the credibility of our research. A large part of this job is creating more of these. The other part is targeted outbound into groups where we have something specific to offer.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
Create the way in
Map target accounts to identify decision-makers, organizational structures, current pain points, and existing connections.
Identify warm introduction paths via investors, advisors, clients, partners, and networks, then brief connectors and draft messaging to ensure successful connections.
Capitalize on key engagement opportunities, such as speaking panels, hosted roundtables, buyer communities, and embedded partners.
Execute highly targeted outbound campaigns focused on specific buyer segments, proven solutions, and relevant triggers rather than high volume.
Own the sales cycle end to end
Run discovery, demos, and technical evaluations with security and engineering leaders.
Scope and drive proofs of concept (POCs): establish success metrics up front, maintain pilot momentum, and drive conversion.
Build compelling commercial and ROI cases to secure executive-level investment.
Own commercial negotiation, security review, procurement and close in sophisticated, multi-stakeholder sales cycles involving senior business, technology, R&D, procurement, legal and executive decision-makers
Build the playbook and hiring the team
Write down what works. Qualification criteria, discovery questions, POC structure, pricing guidance, objection handling, security questionnaire answers.
Build and own the CRM; report on pipeline health, conversion, and what's working well enough to double down on
Define what we need to hire next, and help to hire it.
Product and market insights
Bring honest signals back about why deals progress or stall.
Work with the product team on positioning, pricing, and the collateral enterprise buyers actually ask for.
REPRESENTATIVE PROJECTS
Open an account cold. Pick a target we currently have no route into. Map it, find the warmest path through our network, create the reason for the first conversation, and run it all the way to a scoped pilot.
Compress the cycle. Enterprise evaluations in this market routinely take longer than they need to. Take the process apart, work out where the time actually goes, and rebuild it so an evaluation reaches a decision faster.
Land a lighthouse enterprise. Take a large, slow, security-conscious organisation from first conversation through technical evaluation, security review and procurement to a production contract, and turn the process into a documented path the next one can follow.
Write the playbook. By the time we add the next two people to this team, the thing that gets them productive in a month rather than six should be something you wrote.
JOB REQUIREMENTS
Must-haves
You have closed enterprise deals as an individual contributor for 5+ years.
You have sold at an early-stage company, before it had a machine. You have 2+ years in a startup without mature marketing, an SDR team or brand recognition doing the work for you.
You have closed into large, slow organisations. Our pipeline includes banks, quant funds and government bodies. You have personally run deals through security review, architecture review and procurement, and you have a realistic sense of how long that takes and how to compress it.
Technical credibility with a technical buyer. Our buyers are directors of product security, principal security engineers and engineering leaders. You need to run discovery and a technical evaluation with them without a sales engineer in the room, understand the architecture well enough to be useful, and know when to bring in someone deeper.
High agency and ownership. You decide where the quarter goes, you make the call with incomplete information, and you are accountable for the outcome. Nobody here will be assigning you a territory or a target list.
Startup pace. Comfortable with ambiguity and shifting priorities, and willing to grind when it matters.
Comfortable leveraging AI heavily for research, drafting and deal work, while holding the output to a high standard.
Strong nice-to-haves
You have sold security, developer tools, or infrastructure
Experience with coding agents as a user. You have used Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or similar heavily.
Familiarity with how security teams evaluate vendors, from either side of the table.
Explicitly not required
Formal AI safety background. We need an excellent seller who can learn the AI safety context, and we will teach you what you need to know.
Management experience. This starts as an individual contributor role.
BENEFITS
This role offers market competitive salary, equity, and competitive benefits.
Base Salary: £85,000 - £129,000; Variable: performance incentives against ARR targets
Everyone at Apollo effectively has an unlimited token budget. If a better result costs more compute, use it.
Flexible work hours and schedule
Unlimited vacation
Unlimited sick leave
Up to 6 months of paid parental leave
Comprehensive health, dental and vision insurance
Retirement savings with competitive employer matching
Lunch, dinner, and snacks are provided for all employees on workdays
Paid work trips, including staff retreats, business trips, and relevant conferences
A yearly $1,000 (USD) professional development budget
Relocation support and visa fees (if applicable)
LOGISTICS
Time Allocation: Full-time
Location: This is an in-person role working out of our London office, with regular travel to conferences and customer sites. We offer flexible working hours and some wfh arrangements.
Visa sponsorship: We sponsor visas in the UK. Sponsorship isn't guaranteed for every role or candidate, but if we make you an offer, we'll work with you to find the right visa route.
ABOUT THE TEAM
You will work directly with Kyle Dai, our GTM lead, and alongside the product team: product engineers Jeremy Neiman, Zak Walters, Zen van Riel, Srdjan Miletic and Gustavo Bicalho; and control and security researchers Victor Gillioz, Monika Jotautaitė, Dmitrii Volkov and Billy Gigurtsis. Marius Hobbhahn (CEO) advises the team. You will also interact with our other SWEs and researchers, since we intend to be "our own customer" by using our products internally for our research work. You can find our full team here.
ABOUT APOLLO RESEARCH
The rapid rise in AI capabilities offers tremendous opportunities, but also presents significant risks. At Apollo Research, we're primarily concerned with risks from Loss of Control, i.e. risks coming from the model itself rather than e.g. humans misusing the AI. We're particularly concerned with deceptive alignment / scheming, a phenomenon where a model appears to be aligned but is, in fact, misaligned and capable of evading human oversight.
We work on the science of scheming, detection of scheming (e.g. building evaluations), and scheming mitigations (e.g. anti-scheming). We also work on control and monitoring research (see our scalable monitoring agenda). We work closely with many frontier AI companies, such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Thinking Machines and others, e.g. to test their models and collaborate on the science of scheming. At Apollo, we aim for a culture that emphasizes truth-seeking, being goal-oriented, giving and receiving constructive feedback, and being friendly and helpful. If you're interested in more details about what it's like working at Apollo, you can find more information here.
We also build a coding agent security product called Watcher that secures agent deployments in companies. Our goal is to reduce the probability of catastrophic incidents by securing coding agents, learning about their real-world risks, and publishing our research on how to build these control systems most effectively.
Equality Statement: Apollo Research is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We value diversity and are committed to providing equal opportunities to all, regardless of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, or sexual orientation.
HOW TO APPLY
Please complete the application form with your CV. The provision of a cover letter is neither required nor encouraged. Please also feel free to share links to relevant work samples, including anything you have written.
About the interview process: Our multi-stage process includes a screening interview, a take-home exercise (2-3 hours), 2-3 technical interviews, and a final interview with Marius (CEO). If you want to prepare, we suggest using a coding agent heavily for a week and forming your own view on who should be buying something like Watcher, and why.
Your Privacy and Fairness in Our Recruitment Process: We are committed to protecting your data, ensuring fairness, and adhering to workplace fairness principles in our recruitment process. To enhance hiring efficiency, we use AI-powered tools to assist with tasks such as resume screening. These tools are designed and deployed in compliance with internationally recognized AI governance frameworks. Your personal data is handled securely and transparently. All resumes are screened by a human and final hiring decisions are made by our team. If you have questions about how your data is processed or wish to report concerns about fairness, please contact us at [email protected].