Director, Demand Sales

About Paraform. Paraform is the first end-to-end AI recruiting marketplace, connecting companies with thousands of specialized recruiters and AI agents that work together to fill roles faster and more accurately. We hire for companies like Ramp, Decagon, Rippling, and Hightouch, and we 8×d revenue last year. Were an early-stage, fast-moving team combining a network of expert recruiters with agentic AI tooling.

The role. Were hiring a Director to own new business at Paraform - the team, the motion, and the shape of the org that comes after it. Youll inherit our A-team of six to eight account executives selling into the fastest-growing startups in the country, and within a couple of quarters youll be hiring managers underneath you and building a second line. Youll report to our Head of Demand Sales and sit as a core member of the Demand leadership team alongside marketing and engagement management.

Two things make this a Director seat rather than a management seat. The first is that the demand orgs structure is genuinely undecided - segmentation, vertical coverage, and the path upmarket are yours to design, not to inherit. The second is that the outbound motion has to be rebuilt from the ground up. Our AEs already cold call and send LinkedIn messages; it isnt the motion that wins in our market. The pipeline that converts here comes out of VC networks, founder communities, dinners, and conferences - investors making introductions because they know you personally. Youve built pipeline that way yourself, youve taught a team to do it, and you can install it as a system.

What youll do

• Own new business end to end. Pipeline generation, deal execution, and attainment across the AE team, with a high-velocity motion into seed through Series B founders. You carry the number and the forecast.

• Design the org, not just the team. Decide how we segment, where verticalization earns its keep, what the headcount plan looks like, and how coverage changes as we go upmarket. Bring a point of view and defend it.

• Build the second line. Promote from within where you can and hire externally where you cant. Within two to three quarters you should have at least one manager reporting to you and a bench behind them.

• Install the social-selling motion. Build the VC-referral loop, the dinner program, and the conference presence our outbound is missing - then make it a repeatable system that runs without you in the room.

• Take us upmarket. AEs own accounts for 30 days today, which is deliberately high-velocity and, yes, disincentivizes long-tail growth. Were moving to a 60-90 day window with revenue sharing on strategic accounts targeted for Q1. How we actually climb from SMB and seed/Series A into larger accounts is an open question you get to answer.

• Partner across the business. Work with marketing and engagement management on liquidity, and with product on how our next products go to market - well be multi-product within six months.

What were looking for

• 7-10 years in sales with four-plus years leading, and visible progression through them. Manager senior manager director, or a comparable arc. Were looking for slope: quick promotions, scope that compounds, and ideally an IC-to-manager promotion inside the same company because it means someone bet on you. Long tenure at a flat level is a negative signal for us, not a neutral one.

• Youve managed managers, or youre unambiguously ready to. You can name the first-time managers you promoted, how you de-risked those bets, and what youd do differently.

• Network-led outbound youve personally owned. You can name the investors you worked with and the events you built pipeline from. If your teams pipeline came from marketing, or from SDR-style cold calling with no network layer, this isnt the right fit.

• Youve built a playbook from scratch, run it yourself, and handed it to a team - and you can show the evidence it scaled past you.

• Strong analytical instincts. You dont need to write SQL, but you know exactly what to ask the data, how to validate it, and how to design a hypothesis-driven intervention when the number is off.

• Genuine curiosity about our model. Paraform is a marketplace, not a straight-line SaaS product, and that trips people up. We want someone who asks sharp questions and pushes back in the first conversation, not someone who nods along.

• Something non-linear in your background. Founders who went on to scale inside a real organization, athletes, academics, ex-finance operators, or anyone with a pattern of deliberately choosing unusual businesses. This shows up disproportionately in the people who do well here.

Nice to have: multi-product platforms or fintech selling to startups - Rippling, Ramp, Brex, Mercury, Vanta and similar. Ex-investment-banking or consulting before startup sales.

Why youll love it

• Youre building the demand org, not staffing it. The structure past the current team is undecided, and the person in this seat decides it.

• A real path to second line and beyond. Youll be managing managers by Q2 with the mandate to hire them yourself. The VP seat above this is open and nobody is lined up for it.

• Multi-product within six months. Youll shape how new products go to market, not just sell what exists.

• The upmarket motion is unbuilt. Were making real money in SMB and seed/Series A and were nowhere near upmarket. You can be the person who figures out how we get there.

• Youll sell to the hottest companies in tech. The logos on our platform are the ones everyone else is trying to get into.

Location: San Francisco (in office).

About Paraform:

Paraform is a marketplace modernizing one of the largest and most fragmented markets in the world: hiring. We partner with industry leaders like Decagon, Palantir, Rippling, Abridge, and Hightouch to hire world-class talent, and are growing quickly - 8×-ing revenue last year.

Paraform is the first end-to-end AI recruiting marketplace that connects companies with thousands of specialized recruiters and AI agents that work together to fill roles faster and more accurately.

Our mission is to make hiring fast, reliable, and scalable for every company in the world.

At Paraform, we believe recruiting works best when the right people are working on the right problems, combining human judgment with AI that truly understands hiring. That's why we're building a new foundation for how companies hire, bringing together specialized recruiters and modern AI tools.

We treat recruiters like entrepreneurs, not vendors - and we're building the financial, operational, and technical infrastructure that powers their success.

We are backed by the best investors and technology leaders: Scale, Felicis, A*, BOND, Liquid 2, DST Global, the founders of YouTube, Instacart, Canva, and more.