Account Executive (San Francisco)

About the Role

Appen's Go to Market team sits at the center of the company's growth strategy, partnering with the world's most ambitious AI programs to deliver the data that makes models work. This role is responsible for acquiring net-new strategic logos and expanding high-value accounts across Big Tech, AI Labs, and Enterprise AI adopters. It's a high-visibility commercial role operating across Global and Americas markets.

Location and Work Arrangement

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. You'll be expected to meet clients in person and be comfortable being on site with them regularly.

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Your Impact

You'll own end-to-end enterprise sales cycles, from discovery and qualification through commercial negotiation and contract execution, working from well-developed territory and account plans.

You'll stay multi-threaded across buying, technical, and operational stakeholders, positioning Appen's portfolio as the partner of choice by mapping capabilities directly to each client's AI program priorities. Expect to craft compelling business cases and proposals, and to run regular Executive Business Reviews to keep clients aligned on strategic goals and surface new partnership opportunities.

Pipeline comes from outbound account-based strategies run in partnership with Marketing, backed by strong CRM discipline and accurate, timely forecasts. You'll also orchestrate internal teams across Client Partners, Delivery, Legal, and Finance to shape the solution and pricing behind each bid.

Success in this role looks like year-on-year growth in the accounts you own, and enough standing inside them to influence how those programs are scoped and resourced.

What You Bring

A proven track record of closing complex enterprise deals gained selling directly into frontier AI labs in the AI training data, RLHF, or model evaluation space.

Exceptional communication skills with enough technical credibility to influence engineering and research stakeholders, and C-suite.

The ability to lead complex RFP responses and negotiate MSAs, SOWs, DPAs, and other enterprise agreements.

Comfort building relationships face to face, with regular in-person customer meetings.

A creative approach to problem solving, and the competitive drive to keep moving opportunities forward.

Why You'll Love Working Here

At Appen, we foster a culture of innovation, collaboration, and excellence. We value curiosity, accountability, and a commitment to delivering the highest quality AI solutions for frontier models. You'll work on complex challenges that shape the future of AI across industries and geographies, alongside talented people in a culture that values humility over ego. You'll have the flexibility to deliver in a way that works for you and your team, supported by tools, resources, and development opportunities to continue to build your capability over time.

About Appen

Appen has been a leader in AI training data for over 30 years. We specialise in human generated data to train, fine tune, and evaluate models across generative AI, large language models, computer vision, and speech recognition. Our AI assisted data annotation platform and global crowd of more than 1 million contributors in over 200 countries support model pre training, supervised fine tuning, evaluation and benchmarking, safety and red teaming, and multilingual global expansion.

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$150,000 - $200,000 a year

Base Salary: $150,000 – $200,000 USD. This range reflects the good faith estimate of starting base pay for a new hire in this role as of the posting date.

On-Target Earnings (OTE): Structured as a 50/50 split between base and commission.

\nBase Salary: $150,000 – $200,000 USD. This range reflects the good faith estimate of starting base pay for a new hire in this role as of the posting date. On-Target Earnings (OTE): Structured as a 50/50 split between base and commission.