Account Executive

Overview

You're selling Blacksmith - a faster, cheaper drop-in replacement for GitHub Actions - to companies that already have CI/CD pipelines running. Your buyers are VP/Director of Engineering and platform engineering teams at companies where slow builds are costing developer productivity. You need to understand Docker caching, build times, and infrastructure costs well enough to speak their language.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Early-stage (35 employees, recently hit revenue milestone)

Size: 35 employees

Growth: Just closed largest deal, "more demand than we can handle", actively hiring across GTM

Market Position: Category challenger - competing against GitHub's native Actions product and other CI/CD acceleration tools

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources:

• 40% Inbound - engineers who are frustrated with slow GitHub Actions, found Blacksmith through search/word-of-mouth, already understand the problem
• 50% Outbound - targeting engineering leaders at companies with large eng teams on GitHub, where build times are a known pain point
• 10% Referrals - early customers telling peers

SDR/AE Structure: Small team, likely doing significant self-sourcing alongside working inbound leads

SE Support: Have Solution Engineers (they're hiring for this role), but as early-stage company, you'll need to do technical discovery and demos yourself

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors: GitHub Actions (native), BuildKite, CircleCI, potentially self-hosted runners

How They Differentiate: Drop-in replacement (no workflow rewrites), bare metal gaming CPUs for 2x speed, 40x faster Docker builds, 75% cost reduction

Common Objections: "Why not just optimize our existing setup?", "Is it worth migrating?", "What's the lock-in?", security/compliance for infrastructure tooling

Win Themes: Immediate speed improvement without code changes, measurable ROI on developer time saved, transparent pricing vs GitHub's compute costs

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Prospecting (30%) | Active Deals (40%) | Technical Discovery (20%) | Internal (10%)

Key Activities

• Outbound to engineering leaders: You're researching companies with 50+ engineers on GitHub, finding VP Eng/Director of Platform contacts, and reaching out about build performance. Cold email and LinkedIn are your main channels.
• Technical discovery calls: You're asking about their current CI/CD setup - how many builds per day, what their average build time is, where bottlenecks are, what they're spending on GitHub Actions compute. This isn't surface-level - you need to understand their workflows.
• Proof-of-value conversations: Walking prospects through switching a subset of workflows to Blacksmith, measuring speed improvements, and building the business case. You're calculating hours saved per week and cost delta.
• Multi-threaded selling: You need buy-in from both the platform engineering team (who implement it) and their manager/director (who controls budget). That's usually 3-5 stakeholders per deal.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• You're selling to engineers who are skeptical of sales pitches and want to see proof. If you don't understand Docker layer caching and CI/CD workflows, you'll lose credibility fast.
• The buying process isn't always clear - sometimes platform teams have budget, sometimes it comes from infrastructure, sometimes it needs VP approval. You'll spend time figuring out procurement.
• Companies have inertia. Even if Blacksmith is objectively faster and cheaper, migrating infrastructure takes engineering time and has perceived risk.
• You're competing against "do nothing" as much as other vendors. Many teams know their builds are slow but haven't prioritized fixing it.
• At 35 people, processes are being built. You'll have input on sales methodology, but also less structure than a mature sales org.

What Success Looks Like

• Closing 1-2 deals per month in $25K-$100K range, with occasional larger enterprise deal
• Building a pipeline of 15-20 active opportunities at various stages
• Getting prospects to run pilots and seeing measurable build time improvements (2-3x faster)
• Expansion within accounts as teams add more workflows to Blacksmith

Who You're Selling To

Primary Buyers:

• VP/Director of Engineering (budget holder, cares about developer productivity)
• Platform Engineering Manager/Lead (technical evaluator, owns CI/CD infrastructure)
• Individual Staff/Senior Engineers (influencers, especially at smaller companies)

What They Care About:

• Build time impact on developer productivity: Slow builds mean context switching and waiting. They want their team shipping faster.
• Infrastructure cost efficiency: GitHub Actions charges per minute. They're looking at $5K-$50K/month compute bills and want to cut it.
• Migration risk and effort: Will this break existing workflows? How much engineering time to implement? Can they test it incrementally?
• Reliability and support: If CI/CD goes down, deploys stop. They need confidence in uptime and ability to get help.

Requirements

• 2-4 years selling technical infrastructure or developer tools - you need to understand CI/CD concepts and speak to engineers
• Experience selling to engineering buyers, not just business stakeholders
• Comfortable with technical discovery - asking about build configurations, Docker, deployment pipelines
• Track record of full-cycle sales with 4-8 week cycles in $25K-$150K ACV range
• Self-starter mentality - this is a 35-person company with "more demand than we can handle", so it's high activity, figuring things out as you go
• Ability to do your own outbound prospecting and work inbound leads simultaneously