Account Executive (SMB/Commercial)

About the role

OpenObserve is a fast-growing, developer-forward observability platform built for modern, high-scale systems. We help engineering teams ship faster and sleep better by making logs, metrics, and traces radically simpler, faster, and more cost-efficient. With a cloud-native architecture and smart indexing, OpenObserve delivers real-time insights without the usual complexity or runaway costs-so teams can focus on building, not babysitting infrastructure. We're backed by leading investors and trusted by innovative companies across SaaS, fintech, e-commerce, and enterprise. Customers choose OpenObserve to unify observability, slash spend, and accelerate incident response-all while improving developer experience. Our culture is product-obsessed, customer-driven, and high ownership. We move quickly, value clarity, and empower people to take big swings. If you're energized by building category-defining products and scaling go-to-market at a startup pace, you'll feel right at home. Reporting directly to the Chief Revenue Officer, this is a full-cycle Account Executive role built for a true hunter. You'll own everything from first contact to closed-won-identifying and sourcing your own opportunities, running technical discovery, leading evaluations, and closing deals with DevOps, Platform, and Engineering leaders across SMB, commercial, and select mid-market accounts. You won't be waiting for pipeline to land in your lap. You'll build it. This is the right role if you're someone who thrives on outbound creativity, gets genuinely excited by the technical problems your customers are trying to solve, and wants to be a foundational revenue hire at a company with real momentum and a product that sells itself once the right person sees it. Target quota: $500K-$750K ARR, with a mix of SMB/commercial deals and select mid-market opportunities. OTE: $150K-$200K (50/50 split), plus equity.

Responsibilities

• Pipeline generation: Self-source the majority of your pipeline through outbound prospecting-email, LinkedIn, events, community, and creative account-based plays targeting DevOps, Platform Engineering, and infrastructure leaders.
• Full-cycle selling: Run the entire deal from cold outreach through technical discovery, POC, negotiation, and close. No handoffs, no silos-you own the outcome.
• Technical discovery: Deeply understand a prospect's current observability stack, pain points (cost overruns, Datadog sprawl, alert fatigue, Kubernetes complexity), and the business impact of solving them.
• Evaluation management: Coordinate with our Solutions Engineering team on POCs and technical validations; keep deals moving and stakeholders aligned.
• Value selling: Translate OpenObserve's cost and performance advantages into clear business cases-ROI models, competitive comparisons, and executive narratives.
• Competitive displacement: Identify and convert accounts running Datadog, Elastic, or Splunk who are feeling the pain of cost or complexity. We win these deals regularly-you'll learn exactly how.
• CRM hygiene: Maintain accurate pipeline, activity logs, and forecasting in HubSpot so we can build and scale the revenue function with real data.
• Market feedback: Surface insights from prospects and customers to inform positioning, product direction, and ICP refinement.
• WE'RE LOOKING FOR SOMEONE WHO
• Is sharp and intellectually curious - you ask better questions than most, you study your accounts deeply, and you bring original thinking to every interaction. You don't recycle the same email everyone else is sending.
• Has strong critical thinking - you can quickly assess a prospect's situation, separate signal from noise, and know when a deal is real vs. when you're being strung along.
• Is creative under constraint - early-stage selling requires invention. You'll write your own plays, test your own ideas, and iterate based on what the data tells you.
• Has 2-5 years of full-cycle B2B SaaS sales experience , ideally selling devtools, infrastructure, cloud, or observability into engineering and DevOps organizations.
• Is a self-starter and skilled prospector who is comfortable building pipeline from scratch and isn't dependent on inbound volume to hit quota.
• Understands the technical landscape -you don't need to write code, but you should be able to hold your own in a conversation about Kubernetes, cloud costs, log pipelines, and monitoring architecture.
• Has competed against or sold against Datadog, Elastic, Splunk, or similar -you understand the buying dynamics, the pain points, and what it takes to displace incumbents.
• Is a confident, clear communicator across

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