Director, Government Sales

The context

Beacon builds AI products for government transportation agencies — systems that help them make use of the millions of engineering documents, construction records, and operational files they have accumulated over decades. That material holds most of what an agency knows about how it builds and operates, and while most of it has been digitized and is theoretically reachable, almost none of it is easily accessible. It’s a needle-in-a-haystack problem.

Our work is in production today at state agencies, with people who will speak to the results. We hold contracts through cooperative purchasing vehicles, and the demand we see is well ahead of our ability to engage with those who need it.

That last part is the reason for this role. Sales at Beacon currently runs through the CEO, alongside everything else a founder does. The work of helping an agency find a clean path to purchase — often the real obstacle, more than any question of value — takes real effort and gets less attention than it deserves.

We are hiring someone to carry that. It is a rare assignment: a product that is already working in the field, a market we understand well, and significant untapped opportunity.

What you will own

• A focused set of agencies. You'll have a clear patch to work — a mix of conversations already underway and agencies we haven't reached yet. We'll agree on it together when you start and revisit it as the territory grows, because we can’t see a year out from here.
• Moving agencies from interested to under contract. The hardest part usually isn't convincing an agency of the value. It's working out, with them, a purchasing path that fits their rules and their calendar. Doing that well, deal by deal, is the highest-value thing you can do here.
• Closing, and handing off. The work you sell is delivered by people who aren't you. You won't be the project manager, won't sit on the delivery team, and won't be the agency's day-to-day contact once work starts. Your job the day a contract is signed is to be most of the way into the next one.
• Your own pipeline generation. There's no SDR team and no inbound queue to work. What you have instead is a product that demonstrates well, results you can point to by name, a marketing function mapping the ground ahead of you, and advisors — including a former state DOT director — who know this community and will make introductions.
• Knowing when to bring in the CEO. You run the day-to-day and bring him in where he helps — the executive meeting, the difficult question, the close. Senior enough to carry most conversations alone, candid enough to say when it's time.
• Your deals stay your deals. Some relationships are long-standing and founder-led. Those stay with the CEO, and we'll share that short list before you accept. Everywhere else, his involvement in your accounts is ordinary course — he'll join calls, take meetings, help you close — and you earn full commission on those deals regardless. We're not going to nickel-and-dime who was in the room.
• Field intelligence. Every lost deal and every “not yet” is product feedback, and you sit close enough to the executive and product team that the feedback changes what we build.

How you will be supported

Our marketing function maps the purchasing landscape — which cooperative vehicles each agency can use, which contracts we're already on, where the openings are. That work is theirs, and it's active: we already run multimillion-dollar contracts through it.

What's yours is using those cooperative vehicles. When your account needs the specifics run down — which vehicle, which contract number, what the agency's own rules require — that's your deal and your commission, and you'll chase it with smart questions to the people who have the map.

Writing the cooperative-purchasing bid responses themselves isn't your job — marketing carries that.

How we work

Beacon is an AI-native company, and we mean that practically rather than as a slogan. Nearly everyone here works alongside AI agents every day. They do research, draft documents, prep for meetings, analyze data, and keep track of the details that slip through the cracks at a small company. You'd have the same setup from day one.

For this role, that means account research, meeting prep, follow-ups, and first drafts of proposals and scoping documents take hours instead of days. Your judgment, your relationships, and your time in the room stay yours. We expect you to use these tools well, to tell us when they're not helping, and to help us figure out what good looks like for a seller here. We're working that out as we go, and we'd rather learn it with you than hand you a playbook.

It also matters for how you sell. Agencies want to understand what AI can and can't do with their own records, and someone who works with it every day can answer that honestly.

What we're looking for

We care about four things, and we're deliberately not stacking a fifth on top.

• You are a seller, not a seller-doer. You close and move on. You don't want to run the project afterward, and you won't be asked to.
• You have sold to government clients, and you can prove it. Expect direct questions: what did you close, when, how much, against what quota. Public-sector buying has its own rhythms and rules, and you need to know them.
• You come from technology. You've sold software or technology products, or at minimum worked somewhere that did.
• You're comfortable working with AI. You don't need a technical background, but you should be using these tools daily and forming your own opinions about where they help. We'll assess this in conversation, not by credential.

Beyond those four:

• Transportation experience helps, but isn't required. All else equal we'd rather have someone who already knows something about this world. But if you don't, we'll immerse you in the products and the market, and we're counting on you being smart, ambitious, and good at selling to cover the rest.
• Cooperative purchasing knowledge is a plus, not a gate. If Sourcewell, NASPO, and OMNIA are already familiar, say so. If they aren't, and you've sold serious deals into government some other way, apply anyway.
• Ready for an early-stage company. Small team, unfinished edges, decisions made quickly and sometimes changed. Some people find that energizing and some find it exhausting; we'd rather know which you are now.
• Multi-state reach, or the evident ability to build it.
• Strong references, used respectfully and only once we're near the finish line.

On background: the profile we'd bet on is someone who sold software into government at a technology company. People from engineering and consulting firms are welcome to apply and we'll read those résumés seriously — but the four requirements above are the test, not where you've worked.

What this role is not

• Not a territory with a machine behind it. No SDRs, no MQLs, no sales engineer bench, no established category doing half the explaining for you.
• Not a catalog sale. There's no price book to quote from. What an agency buys is assembled from our platform to fit their actual problem, so you'll be scoping in the room.
• Not a book of business you execute against. You aren't building a portfolio to staff, run, and farm.

How success is measured

• Months 1–3 are a ramp. You'll learn the products well enough to demo them yourself, sit alongside delivery on live engagements so you know what we can honestly promise, and work your accounts alongside the CEO before you work them alone.
• Six months is a typical floor for first revenue at a new agency. Procurement cycles and budget calendars move at their own pace. We're not going to pretend otherwise and then hold you to a number too early.
• By month 12: closed business, and a pipeline a reasonable person would forecast from.
• What we don't count: revenue under management. That's the Delivery Principal's scoreboard, not yours. Yours is what you close and successfully hand off.

Career growth

This is a new role and you'd be the first to hold it. Beacon's commercial motion is one person wide today, and whoever widens it stands at the front of whatever the sales organization becomes.

• A function to build. If you want to lead a sales team, the sequence is: prove the motion works with you in it, then hire under it.
• Bigger deals, not more headcount. Our contracts range from pilots to multi-year, multi-million-dollar platform engagements. Your ceiling is the size and durability of what you close.
• Proximity. We're small. Senior people who join now sit in on pricing, market selection, and strategy because there's no layer between you and the executive team.
• Economic upside. Everyone full-time holds stock options, and equity grows with responsibility rather than tenure.

What we can't offer is a pre-drawn org chart with your name in a box three levels up. What we can offer is a firm small enough that the ambitious people draw the boxes.

Compensation and logistics

• Base ($150K–$190K) plus commission, with no upside cap and a structure that accounts for a public-sector cycle in year one.
• Pro-level subscriptions to the AI tools you'll use daily.
• Fully remote, with an allowance for home office expenses.
• Travel (about 25%) — agencies, conferences, and the events where this market actually gets sold. We also hold in-person team sessions roughly twice a year, typically in New York or Atlanta.