Founding Account Executive

Founding Account Executive

Kana | San Francisco (preferred) or Remote US | Reports to CRO

About Kana

Kana is the agentic marketing platform built for the AI era. Founded by the team behind Rapt (acquired by Microsoft) and Krux (acquired by Salesforce for $700M), Kana emerged from stealth in February 2026 with $15M in seed funding led by Mayfield.

We deploy customizable AI agents that integrate with marketers' existing stacks rather than replacing them. Our platform handles campaign management, customer engagement, marketing intelligence, synthetic data generation, answer engine optimization, and media proposal generation – giving marketing teams a "third path" between building from scratch and buying off-the-shelf. We believe in augmented intelligence: AI that amplifies marketers, not replaces them.

We're a small, senior team building deliberately. This is a ground-floor opportunity to shape Kana's GTM motion alongside two founders who have done this before.

The Role

We're hiring a Founding Account Executive – the first dedicated seller at Kana. You'll work directly with the CRO and the founders to take a thoughtful, founder-led sales motion and turn it into a repeatable one. This is a build role, not a plug-and-play role.

In your first six months, you'll:

• Own full-cycle sales for Kana's agentic marketing platform, from prospecting through close
• Partner with the founders on early enterprise deals and translate what's working into a repeatable playbook
• Help shape Kana's ICP, messaging, and sales process based on real market signal
• Build pipeline through outbound, your own network, and partnerships 
• Sell into CMOs, heads of growth, marketing operations leaders, and data/analytics buyers at mid-market and enterprise consumer brands, media companies, and consumer-tech companies
• Work cross-functionally with Engineering, and Marketing to inform product direction and positioning

Who You Are

You're a builder, not an operator of someone else's playbook. You're energized by ambiguity, comfortable walking into a room with a half-formed deck, and genuinely curious about how AI is reshaping marketing. You've sold complex software to senior buyers before, and you know how to be consultative without being soft – you can challenge a CMO's thinking and earn their trust in the same conversation.

Ideally you have:

• 4+ years of experience in enterprise or mid-market software sales, ideally at a martech, adtech, CDP, marketing analytics, or AI-native company
• Experience selling to marketing buyers: CMOs, VPs of Marketing, heads of growth, marketing ops, or data/analytics leaders
• A track record of consistent quota attainment, with at least one stint at an early-stage company where you helped build the motion
• Strong written and verbal communication – you can run a discovery call, write a tight follow-up, and present to an executive room

You might also have:

• A non-traditional path into sales – management consulting, marketing operations, agency strategy, or product marketing backgrounds welcomed
• Experience selling AI or agentic products, or selling into customers who are still figuring out what AI means for their business
• A network in the modern martech ecosystem you can activate

What We Offer

• Competitive base salary and meaningful equity in an early-stage venture-backed AI company
• Direct partnership with founders who have built and exited companies
• The opportunity to define Kana's sales motion from the ground up alongside a small, senior team
• Health, dental, and vision benefits; flexible PTO; and SF-based collaboration with remote flexibility