About this role.
Appen is hiring an enterprise Account Executive to acquire strategic new logos and grow high-value AI accounts across Big Tech, AI labs, and enterprise adopters. The role owns the full sales process, including discovery, qualification, solution development, proposals, negotiations, and contract execution. The successful candidate will coordinate internal delivery, legal, finance, marketing, and client-partner teams while maintaining rigorous CRM forecasting and account planning. This is a senior, high-visibility sales position requiring experience selling AI training data, RLHF, model evaluation, or related solutions to technical and executive buyers.
Role DNA
A quick view of the complexity, pace, ownership and collaboration implied by the job description.
Job Complexity
5/5Pace & Pressure
5/5Autonomy Level
5/5Communication Load
5/5Salary analysis
Estimated compensation compared with the broader US market for similar roles.
Core skills
Skills and capabilities most closely associated with this opportunity.
Sample interview questions
I begin by mapping the buying committee, their success measures, decision process, and potential risks. I tailor value messaging for each group, validate technical fit with subject-matter experts, maintain a mutual action plan, and use executive alignment to resolve cross-functional blockers before the commercial close.
I would first understand the lab's model roadmap, data-quality requirements, safety priorities, languages, modalities, and operational constraints. I would then connect Appen's human-generated data, global contributor network, and evaluation capabilities to measurable outcomes such as stronger benchmark performance, safer model behavior, scalable multilingual coverage, and reliable delivery.
I qualify the opportunity early, clarify evaluation criteria, and build an internal response team with clear owners and deadlines. During negotiation, I protect value by anchoring terms to the customer's desired outcomes, identifying trade-offs across scope, service levels, pricing, and risk, and escalating legal or delivery issues promptly.
I use account segmentation, stakeholder mapping, trigger-based research, and coordinated account-based outreach with marketing. I maintain disciplined CRM hygiene, define next steps and exit criteria for every opportunity, inspect conversion rates regularly, and balance near-term opportunities with longer-term executive relationship development.
I establish success metrics and governance at implementation, then run regular executive business reviews that connect delivered results to the customer's strategic AI priorities. By staying close to delivery teams and identifying new use cases, I can surface expansion opportunities while ensuring the account receives consistent value.
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.
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.
- 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.
Compensation
Additional Information
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.
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