VP Public Sector Sales at Sierra - Build AI GovTech in Columbus
Career & Market Insight
This is a rare founding leadership opportunity — VP of Public Sector Sales at a high-growth AI company with FedRAMP High certification and co-founders with pedigrees at OpenAI, Salesforce, and Google. That combination is exceptional and signals serious institutional credibility for a government push.
Compensation context: No salary is disclosed, but VP of Sales roles at Series B/C AI companies in San Francisco typically range from $250K–$400K OTE, with meaningful equity. Given Sierra's profile and the seniority required (15+ years, $1M+ deal experience), total comp likely sits at the upper end or beyond market.
Career development value:
- You'll build a public sector GTM motion from scratch — rare, high-leverage experience that translates to CRO/GM roles.
- Deep exposure to AI platform sales in a regulated, complex environment (GovTech + FedRAMP) is an increasingly scarce and valuable skill set.
- Partnering directly with a GM and founders offers visibility and influence that mid-market enterprise roles rarely provide.
Green flags: Strong co-founder credibility, explicit values around family/work-life balance, equity participation, and a differentiated product with early traction in federal agencies.
Potential red flags: Early-stage public sector team means significant structure-building with limited internal playbooks. Government sales cycles are notoriously long — pressure to show results quickly in a slow-moving market requires managing up effectively. The "intensity" value signals a demanding pace.
About Us
Sierra is the leading platform for customer-facing AI agents, working with many of the world's biggest brands — including The GAP, Rocket Mortgage, SoFi, Sutter Health, and SoftBank — to transform how they serve customers and grow their businesses. We are primarily an in-person company based in San Francisco, with growing offices across North America, Europe, and Asia.
We are guided by a set of values at the core of our actions: Trust, Customer Obsession, Craftsmanship, Intensity, and a commitment to balancing Family along the way.
Our co-founders are Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor. Bret currently serves as Board Chair of OpenAI and was previously co-CEO of Salesforce and CTO of Facebook. Clay spent 18 years at Google, leading Google Labs, Google's AR/VR effort, Project Starline, Google Lens, and Google Workspace.
About the Public Sector Team
Sierra recently received FedRAMP High certification and was awarded its first contract with a federal agency. We're now building our founding public sector team to redefine the relationship between government and its citizenry.
Our agents already enable citizens to access social services, report fraud, and understand complex government systems — while empowering government officials to better hear the concerns of their constituencies.
We are explicitly nonpartisan and committed to empowering public servants to leverage AI to advance their missions.
What You'll Do
Build and lead Sierra's public sector sales team: Recruit, develop, and lead a team of account executives serving strategic federal, state, or local government accounts. Set clear expectations, coach for performance, and build a culture of customer obsession, accountability, and consistent execution.
Own revenue growth and territory strategy: Translate Sierra's public sector ambitions into territory coverage, account priorities, pipeline goals, and revenue plans. Allocate resources thoughtfully, maintain rigorous forecasts, and drive the team to consistently achieve or exceed revenue targets.
Create opportunities around mission outcomes: Build executive relationships with agency leaders and help your team translate priorities — such as constituent access, service delivery, workforce effectiveness, and program integrity — into compelling AI agent opportunities. Serve as an executive sponsor for strategic accounts.
Guide complex sales cycles from discovery through award: Coach account executives through long, multi-stakeholder government buying processes and engage directly at critical moments. Mobilize cross-functional support for executive alignment, solution development, business cases, security and legal reviews, pricing, proposal strategy, negotiation, and close.
Shape acquisition and capture strategy: Ensure every priority opportunity has a credible path to contract and a disciplined capture plan. Help the team navigate funding, fiscal-year timing, competitive dynamics, and procurement pathways — including GSA schedules, GWACs, IDIQs, BPAs, state schedules, and cooperative purchasing agreements.
Scale Sierra's partner ecosystem: Build productive relationships with prime contractors, systems integrators, resellers, distributors, small-business partners, and technology providers. Guide decisions about direct sales, subcontracting, teaming, and partner-led transactions.
Lead strategic prime and teaming relationships: Establish executive alignment with key partners and help shape account ownership, deal registration, workshare, and joint go-to-market plans.
Drive disciplined pursuit and proposal decisions: Partner with the Public Sector GM on bid/no-bid recommendations and prioritize resources across strategic pursuits. Align sales, legal, security, product, engineering, and delivery teams to produce compliant, differentiated procurement responses.
Stay accountable for customer success: Build trust with senior agency leaders, establish strong handoffs from sales to delivery, and remain engaged through deployment and expansion.
Build a repeatable public sector go-to-market motion: Work with public sector leadership to refine account segmentation, hiring and capacity plans, capture processes, partner strategy, contract-vehicle priorities, and sales playbooks.
Lead an AI-native sales organization: Embed AI into how the team researches accounts, develops outreach, synthesizes calls, plans opportunities, creates proposals, and forecasts.
What You'll Bring
15+ years of selling experience: Extensive experience in enterprise customer-facing sales roles, specifically selling to the U.S. government.
People leadership experience: 10+ years managing, mentoring, and developing a high-performing enterprise sales team.
Enterprise experience: You've run and managed end-to-end complex deals ($1M+).
Strong fluency in government acquisition and procurement, including funding and budget cycles, competitive solicitations, proposal processes, task orders, and common Federal or state contract vehicles.
Experience developing and executing capture strategies before a solicitation is released — not simply responding once an RFP is public.
A strong network and demonstrated ability to work with government technology partners, including prime contractors, systems integrators, resellers, distributors, and small-business teaming partners.
Sound judgment about direct, channel, prime/subcontractor, and teaming models, with the ability to select and execute the right path for a particular agency and opportunity.
The ability to build credibility with agency executives, program leaders, contracting and procurement officials, security teams, and technical stakeholders.
Excellent executive communication, negotiation, account planning, and forecasting skills — rigorous about details, procurement milestones, and next steps.
A passion for public sector work and a belief in the potential of government institutions to improve outcomes for the people they serve.
Comfort operating with high ownership in an early-stage business: you create structure where it does not yet exist, move with urgency, and collaborate deeply across functions.
Our Values
Trust: We build trust with our customers through accountability, empathy, quality, and responsiveness. We build trust in AI by making it more accessible, safe, and useful.
Customer Obsession: We deeply understand our customers' business goals and relentlessly focus on driving outcomes, not just technical milestones.
Craftsmanship: We get the details right, from the words on the page to the system architecture. We are proud of the products we produce.
Intensity: We know we don't have the luxury of patience. We play to win. When we fail, we talk about it openly and without blame so we succeed the next time.
Family: We know that balance and intensity are compatible. We are the best technology company for parents. We support and celebrate each other's personal and professional achievements.
What We Offer
We want our benefits to reflect our values and offer the following to full-time employees:
Flexible (unlimited) paid time off
Medical, dental, and vision benefits for you and your family
Life insurance and disability benefits
Retirement plan dependent on country of employment
Parental leave
Fertility and family building benefits through Carrot
Lunch, as well as delicious snacks and coffee to keep you energized
Discretionary benefit stipend giving people the ability to spend where it matters most
Free alphorn lessons
These benefits are further detailed in Sierra's policies, may vary by region, and are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefits plans. Eligible full-time employees can participate in Sierra's equity plans subject to the terms of the applicable plans and policies.
Be You, With Us
We're working to bring the transformative power of AI to every organization in the world. We believe our work and culture are better when we encourage, support, and respect different skills and experiences. We encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description. We strive to evaluate all applicants consistently without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, pregnancy, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this VP of Public Sector Sales role remote or in-person?
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