Founding Account Executive (Product - Watcher)

Company: Apollo Research Location: Great Britain Employment type: Full-time

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 hire 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: 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 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: 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.

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.