Account Executive – Maritime Decarbonization & Compliance

Your mission

• Build and work your own pipeline: research target accounts, cold call, cold email, and use your network to get meetings with chartering teams, compliance leads, and CEOs/CFOs at shipping companies.
• Run product demos and consultative sales conversations — you'll need to genuinely understand how FuelEU Maritime penalties, EU ETS costs, and CII ratings work, well enough to build a specific, credible ROI case for each prospect's fleet.
• Handle objections from technically sophisticated buyers — their own compliance teams, brokers, class societies. Vague value propositions will not survive these conversations.
• Adapt the pitch to who you're actually talking to and what they operate: an owner, operator, or technical manager will each care about different things, and a container line, dry bulk operator, tanker company, or project cargo carrier each face different regulatory exposure and cost structure. You'll need to translate FuelEU Maritime, EU ETS, CII, and UK ETS — and ZERO44's specific features — into what matters for that business model.
• Manage your deals end to end: qualification, demo, proposal, negotiation, close, and handover to Customer Success.
• Feed learnings from the field back into our commercial strategy, pricing, and product positioning.

Your profile

• A genuine hunter mentality: you're intrinsically motivated to win new customers, comfortable picking up the phone to a stranger, and energized rather than drained by prospecting.
• Proven experience carrying and hitting a sales quota as an individual contributor — not just "leading a sales motion" or "developing a go-to-market strategy."
• The intellectual curiosity and discipline to learn a technical, regulatory subject in real depth, and translate it into a simple, credible ROI story for each customer.
• An understanding of how shipping businesses actually work — the difference between an owner, an operator, and a technical manager, and how their incentives and pain points differ; and how a container line, a dry bulk operator, a tanker company, and a project cargo carrier each experience regulation and cost differently. If you don't have this yet, you're genuinely curious enough to build it fast.
• Strong objection-handling skills and comfort in a room with people who know more about their own ship's engine than you do — and the ability to hold your ground with facts.
• Structured, disciplined follow-through: you keep a pipeline organized and move deals forward without needing to be chased.
• General comfort with everyday software: you can navigate Google Workspace, a CRM like HubSpot, video calls, and screen sharing on your own, and you don't lose momentum when something needs a login, an update, or a five-minute fix. This is a software company — you should like using tools, not tolerate them.
• Experience selling into shipping, logistics, energy, or another asset-heavy, regulated B2B industry.
• Experience selling compliance, ESG, or technical SaaS products.
• English fluency (German is a plus for our Berlin base and DACH prospects).

Why us?

• A smart team that genuinely wants to build — people who are a joy to work with, and who take the work seriously without taking themselves too seriously.
• Flat hierarchies: direct communication with the founders  and influence on real product decisions.
• A high level of independence — you own your pipeline, your process, and your outcomes, with the trust to run your own show.
• A real chance to shape not just sales, but ZERO44's product development and company strategy — the insights you bring back from the field feed directly into what we build and where we go next.
• A compensation structure with a meaningful, uncapped commission component tied to revenue you close.
• Flexible set-up: we're open to full-time employment or a freelance/fractional engagement, depending on fit.

How to apply

Send us a short note — no cover-letter fluff — about one deal you're proud of closing: how you found it, what almost killed it, and how you got it over the line. Include your CV.

About us

Who we are
ZERO44 is a Berlin-based maritime tech company on a mission to help shipping reach carbon zero. Founded in 2022, we're backed by investors from the shipping industry and the Berlin startup ecosystem, and we work daily with shipowners, operators, and technical managers who are navigating one of the biggest regulatory shifts the industry has seen in decades.

What we do
We built the platform that turns carbon regulation into a competitive advantage instead of just a compliance burden. ZERO44 connects vessel data, contracts, and registries into one carbon ledger — giving shipping companies real-time visibility into their FuelEU Maritime, EU ETS, and CII exposure, and the tools to plan strategy, not just file reports. Our customers use ZERO44 to cut manual work, avoid costly compliance errors, and protect their margins as regulation tightens. Don't just comply. Compete.

Our team
We're a small, mostly remote team of builders — spanning engineering, product, and commercial roles — who came together because we think shipping's transition to carbon zero is one of the most interesting problems in climate tech right now. Between us, we've built deep maritime and regulatory expertise: we understand FuelEU Maritime, EU ETS, CII, and UK ETS in the kind of detail our customers' own compliance teams expect, and we keep that expertise current as the regulation keeps moving. We work closely together, wear multiple hats, and care more about getting things right for our customers than about hierarchy or titles. Based in Berlin, with the team mostly working remotely across Europe.