Founding Account Executive: Industrial Fire Prevention and Predictive Maintenance
Avian
·Today
- Location
- Auburn, Michigan
- Department
- Sales
- Source
- Personio
Description
Your mission
Fires and unplanned downtime cost industrial companies millions. We catch both before they happen.
AVIAN's Swiss-engineered infrared cameras and AI monitoring detect abnormal heat inside industrial facilities at the point of inception. One signal does two jobs: it flags fire risk before a fire starts, and equipment wear before it becomes an unplanned shutdown.
Our system has already prevented thousands of fire events and saved millions of dollars in downtime prevented in live operations across wood processing, recycling and paper. We are also driving in new, exciting verticals like data centers and battery storage facilities with our powerful, adaptable solution.
Customers are coming to us and insurers are partnering with us, but that demand is a fraction of the opportunity. Thousands of facilities have never heard our name. You are joining our founding sales team in the US as one of its first Account Executives, reporting to the SVP of Sales and helping us scale toward $10M+ ARR.
What you'll own:
- The full cycle. New ARR and expansion deals from first contact to signature: discovery, demo, site visit, ROI case, proposal, negotiation, close. You sell to operations, maintenance and reliability, safety, procurement, and executive buyers, often inside the same account.
- Your pipeline. You prospect directly into plant managers, maintenance and reliability leaders, safety leaders, and executives at high-risk facilities, consistently, not only when the funnel thins. Marketing, trade shows, partner referrals, and SDR-booked meetings are a bonus on top. The number is yours, and reaching it means working the phones hard every week.
- The business case. You turn operational pain into an urgent financial argument: unplanned downtime, damaged equipment, lost inventory, rising insurance requirements. Some buyers move over what a fire would cost once, others over what a failing bearing costs every quarter.
- The account after signature. You do not hand the customer off. You keep the relationship and grow it.
- The feedback loop. You work closely with marketing, product, and implementation, and what you learn from the market shapes our pitch, pricing, and roadmap.
Land and expand:
- Land. The first purchase is usually one site, often one high-risk area inside it: a shredder line, a baler, a dryer, a chip pile. You win it by making the risk and the financial case impossible to ignore.
- Prove. You stay close through installation and the first months of monitoring. Early results earn you the right to ask for more: a heat event caught before it spread, a bearing flagged before it seized, a cleaner insurance conversation.
- Expand within the site. Coverage grows from that first area to the whole facility as trust builds and the early saves add up.
- Expand across the account. Most customers run several facilities, some run dozens. One plant that trusts us becomes the reference for the next, and eventually the group standard. You work upward to corporate operations, safety, and risk, and outward to every other site.
This takes patience and emotional intelligence. Plant managers guard their budgets and their independence. Corporate teams want one standard across every site. You need credibility with both, and going to corporate too early can cost you the plant champion who got you in.
The account stays yours as it grows, and every expansion inside it pays you again. Some of your biggest wins in year two will come from accounts you landed in year one.
What success looks like in year one:
- You close new customers and expansions that put AVIAN on the path to $10M+ ARR.
- You self-source most of your own pipeline.
- You turn your first sites into proof points, and at least one into a second site.
- For your largest accounts, you build plans that map every facility, every stakeholder, and a path to standardizing on AVIAN.
- You document what works, so the hires after you ramp faster.
Your profile
Who you are:
- You've closed complex B2B deals. Technical products, multiple stakeholders, real negotiation, and you've consistently hit or beaten quota doing it.
- You build your own pipeline. Startup, scale-up, or a scrappy team inside a larger industrial company, you have sold where nobody handed you leads. Many of your best deals started with you reaching out cold, and you can name them.
- You grow accounts over years, not quarters. You can point to a customer that started small and got much bigger because of how you managed it, and name the people you won over at each stage.
- You read operational buyers well. Plant managers, maintenance and reliability leaders, and safety directors can tell within five minutes whether you understand their world. You can also read who is skeptical, who feels threatened, and who quietly decides. Here that is the job, not a soft skill.
- You're structured. Clean CRM (we run HubSpot), honest forecasts, disciplined next steps, strong follow-up.
- You're ready to be on the road. You travel to customer sites, trade shows, and team meetings as the deal demands.
You might be coming from fire protection, industrial automation, condition monitoring, predictive maintenance, machine vision, safety tech, or insurance loss control. If you've sold into plants and facilities, we want to hear from you.
Bonus points if you've sold in our core verticals (wood processing, recycling, paper), rolled out a solution across multiple sites of one customer, or built relationships with insurers, brokers, integrators, or OEMs that open doors.
If you don't tick every box but you know you can sell this, apply anyway and tell us why.
Why us?
What we offer:
- Compensation: competitive base plus uncapped variable, where every new site pays as new business and every expansion or upsell inside your sites pays on top
- Equity: meaningful ownership as a founding commercial team member
- Access: you report to the SVP of Sales and work directly with our leadership team and founders, with real influence on pricing, pitch, and go-to-market
- A product that sells into urgency you do not have to manufacture: fires are an existential risk, downtime costs our customers every month, and insurers increasingly require prevention
- Flexible, high-trust working model with an international, customer-obsessed team
How we work:
Clarity, ownership, speed. Everyone owns outcomes end-to-end. We fail fast and fix faster. Knowledge is shared, decisions are open, feedback is constant.
Hiring process:
- Intro call (30 min): mutual fit and your track record
- Deep-dive interview: how you sell, including a deal you sourced yourself and an account you grew
- Practical exercise: a discovery and pitch simulation on a real facility scenario (recycling plant or sawmill), then how you would grow that site into the rest of the group
- Meet the team and a conversation with our founders
- Offer: we move in weeks, not months
AVIAN is an equal-opportunity employer. We welcome applicants regardless of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, or veteran status. Reasonable accommodations are available upon request.