Founding Head of Sales

About Northsea

northsea-1 is building Europe’s next-generation AI infrastructure: a European AI cloud on specialized silicon, with a path to North Sea renewable power.

Customers rent capacity by the hour or on contract, buy managed inference, training and evaluations, or have Northsea’s account teams and forward-deployed engineers deploy AI that fits them and stays sovereign to them, hosted on Northsea’s cloud.

Northsea’s software makes a fleet of different silicon look like the one homogeneous cluster teams already know. Customers run inference, pre-training, continued pre-training, fine-tuning and reinforcement learning with the tools and workflows they use today. Northsea ports and tunes each architecture once, then schedules every job onto the silicon with the lowest full cost at the latency the customer needs, or reserves dedicated capacity to their specification. Their developers never deal with a new workflow; Northsea deals with the silicon, and reuses that work across every customer.

Every training run creates versions that have to be evaluated and served, and serving feeds the next update, so running, training and evaluating models is one service on one fleet.

First deployments are being prepared.

The role

As our first sales hire, you’ll work with Northsea’s founding team to turn customer requirements into commercial agreements. You’ll personally source opportunities, lead customer conversations and negotiate the first contracts, while building the systems that make this work repeatable.

Your work will help establish which customers, workloads and commitments should shape our first deployments.

What you’ll own

• Customer acquisition

  Build a focused account list, identify decision-makers and run outreach, discovery, proposals and negotiations. Use LinkedIn, introductions and email together to develop relationships.

• Customer segments and offers

  Find the strongest initial opportunities across AI labs, AI platform companies, infrastructure resellers, enterprise AI teams and research organisations. Match a concrete offer to a funded workload and a reason to buy.

• Capacity reservations

  Establish the capacity, workload requirements, start window, term and budget behind each opportunity. Negotiate reservations and commercial commitments with technical and financial input from the team.

• Partnerships

  Develop relationships with resellers and managed infrastructure providers that have customer demand and need a supply partner.

• Sales operations and automation

  Set up and run our CRM and acquisition workflows: research, qualification, personalised outreach, follow-ups, reply handling and reporting. Use automation and AI to improve the work.

• Commercial forecasting

  Keep qualified demand, provisional interest, signed commitments and collected payments distinct. Bring credible customer evidence into capacity and deployment planning.

What you bring

• Experience personally sourcing and closing B2B deals in cloud, compute, hosting, AI infrastructure or a closely related technical market.
• The ability to discuss workloads and infrastructure requirements with technical buyers, and commercial terms with founders, finance teams and procurement.
• Experience building a pipeline and a sales process in an early-stage business, with the independence to decide what needs doing and follow it through.
• Practical fluency with CRMs, sales workflows and AI-assisted research. You can configure useful automations and work with engineers on deeper integrations.
• Clear writing, disciplined follow-up and sound judgement about customer fit, pricing, commitments and what the company can deliver.

Your first months

Establish a prioritised account list with named buyers, relevant workloads and purchasing windows. Put the CRM and coordinated outreach workflows into daily use. Progress qualified opportunities through technical assessment and proposals toward the first signed customer agreements.

We’ll assess progress through the quality of the opportunities, customer commitments and commercial economics. Activity reporting should help us make decisions about the next deal and deployment.

Working with us

You’ll report to Northsea’s founding leadership team and work closely with our technical team. You’ll own the commercial process, with leadership support on strategic accounts and major commercial decisions. Technical suitability and delivery commitments are agreed with the people responsible for the infrastructure.

The initial engagement is as an independent commercial contractor, with a full-time commitment and a hybrid working arrangement based in Brussels. As the customer base grows, you’ll help shape how we expand sales and partnerships.

Compensation

Compensation initially consists of commission on future deals plus equity. There is no base salary before funding. Any salary after funding will be agreed separately.

The commission structure and equity grant, including vesting terms, will be agreed before you start.