Sr. Sales Leader, Frontier AI, Frontier AI, Global Startup & Venture Capital

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a complete set of cloud services that enable all companies, from startups to enterprises, to run virtually everything in the cloud. The Frontier startup segment represents one of the most strategically important and rapidly growing areas of AWS, with these customers driving the future of AI and becoming tomorrow's enterprise leaders. As AWS continues to lead in the GenAI and Agentic space, we seek a Senior Sales Leader of Frontier Sales to own, operate, and define strategy for the account team working with startups that are building technology at the edge of evolving AI technology. This role is responsible for substantial revenue driven by AI/ML, GenAI, and Agentic startup customers, with ambitious multi-year growth targets.

Role Overview

You will be responsible for setting the vision, strategic direction, plan, and goals to win the best AI startups in Silicon Valley. This includes direct responsibility for leading a team of senior, GenAI account managers in Northern California within the Startups organization. You will lead a matrixed team of Sales, Solution Architects, Business Development, and Go-To-Market functions. Unlike traditional sales leadership roles, this position requires ownership of a market segment with substantial revenue responsibility, direct influence on AWS product strategy through customer feedback, and engagement at the highest levels of AWS and Amazon. Proficiency in managing direct and matrixed resources is required, as is expertise in emerging AI technologies with an ability to engage technical founders.

Key job responsibilities
Strategic Leadership & Revenue Delivery

- Drive significant annual revenue with strong YoY growth for the Frontier AI business in Silicon Valley.
- Own relationships with top-tier AI startups building frontier AI technologies across foundation models, agentic AI, and vertical AI applications.
- Execute complex, high-value opportunities with sophisticated AI startups, navigating technical, commercial, competitive, and partnership elements simultaneously.
- Meet AI revenue targets while building a pipeline of future Enterprise customers.
- Navigate highly competitive environments to secure adoption of emerging startups

Ecosystem & Executive Engagement
- Cultivate and maintain strategic relationships with top-tier venture capital firms and leading accelerators.
- Engage directly with AWS executive leadership and customer C-suite executives.
- Serve as the voice of AI startup customers to AWS service teams, influencing product roadmaps and go-to-market strategies.

Organization Leadership

- Build and scale a high-performing sales team
- Establish consistent performance metrics and development paths across diverse technical and sales skillsets.
- Coordinate with AWS Partner Organization (APO) on co-sell, sell-with, and sell-to approaches
- Own feedback loops to service teams on customer requirements for frontier AI workloads

Complexity Factors

This role operates in a rapidly growing AI market with ambitious revenue targets, requiring:

Market Segment Ambiguity: Operating without structured playbooks, continually encountering new technologies and business models.
Technical Depth: Deep expertise in frontier AI, foundation models, training infrastructure, and inference workloads.
Speed & Precision: Competing at the highest levels for top AI startups.
Stakeholder Complexity: Coordinating across internal leadership teams, external partners, and investors

Basic Qualifications

- BASIC QUALIFICATIONS
- 10+ years of technology-related sales or business development experience
- 5+ years of sales leadership experience
- Proven track record building and scaling successful sales teams.
- Deep expertise in the AI/ML and GenAI startup ecosystem, including understanding of foundation models, training infrastructure, and inference workloads
- Experience structuring and closing complex, multi-year deals
- Demonstrated ability to engage and influence C-suite executives and board members
- Strong relationships with top-tier venture capital firms and startup accelerators
- Experience managing matrixed teams across multiple job families
- Exceptional strategic thinking and ability to operate in highly ambiguous, fast-moving environments
- Strong verbal and written communication skills with ability to engage technical and business audiences
- BA/BS degree required

Preferred Qualifications

- PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
- MBA/MA/MS degree in relevant fieldPrevious experience at a leading technology company with cloud expertise
- Technical background in engineering, computer science, or AI/ML
- History of working for or selling to tech startups, particularly in the AI/ML space
- Experience with AWS services, particularly SageMaker,