Head of Sales, Lambda Cloud
Overview
Lambda is building the cloud infrastructure that powers the frontier of AI. We are seeking a Head of Sales to lead the commercial engine that brings this to market. This is a senior leadership role reporting directly to the GM of Lambda Cloud. The position requires presence in our San Francisco/San Jose office location 4 days per week.
What You’ll Do
Team Leadership & Structure: Recruit, develop, and retain a team of enterprise account executives and sales support functions, setting a high bar for rigor, customer focus, and commercial creativity. Define and evolve pod/vertical structure for sales coverage — including assignment of sellers to segments across enterprises, AI-native startups, and developers — ensuring each segment has a clearly owned GTM motion. Establish clear performance expectations, coaching cadences, and career development frameworks that help individual sellers grow and succeed.
Commercial Strategy & Deal Execution: Design and maintain scalable, flexible commercial terms that can accommodate a wide range of deal structures — from short-term on-demand credits to long-duration reserved capacity commitments. Partner with finance and legal to build a deal desk function capable of turning around complex enterprise quotes quickly without sacrificing margin discipline. Advise leadership on incentive compensation structure for the sales team, balancing bookings, revenue, and strategic account objectives. Own and close a portfolio of strategic accounts personally where executive presence and relationships are a differentiator.
Pipeline Management & Forecasting: Drive a rigorous weekly and monthly pipeline review cadence, including systematic evaluation of pipeline degradation — identifying deals at risk, understanding root causes, and taking corrective action. Maintain accurate, real-time forecasting discipline across the team, ensuring Lambda leadership has reliable signal on near-term and long-term revenue trajectory. Develop early warning indicators and pipeline health metrics that help the team get ahead of slippage before it becomes a miss.
Capacity Allocation & Revenue Operations: Collaborate with infrastructure and capacity planning teams to translate customer demand signals into GPU capacity allocation decisions, helping Lambda deploy capital where it will generate the highest commercial return. Manage the assignment and prioritization of salable GPU capacity across customer segments and deal types, balancing short-term revenue with strategic account development. Collaborate with the GM and product teams to surface customer demand patterns that should inform capacity investment and site expansion decisions.
Customer Feedback & Product Influence: Systematically gather and synthesize customer feedback on GPU availability, pricing, product features, and service quality, and channel that input into product management with the specificity needed to drive action. Serve as the commercial voice of the customer in internal roadmap and prioritization discussions, advocating for features and capabilities that will open new revenue opportunities or protect existing ones. Build strong relationships with technical buyers and economic decision-makers at key accounts, developing a deep understanding of their infrastructure roadmaps and where Lambda can grow share of wallet.
GTM & Partnerships: Coordinate with marketing on demand generation, event strategy, and account-based programs that fill the top of the funnel for enterprise segments. Collaborate with commercial/technical partnership team to Identify and develop channel and reseller relationships — including cloud marketplace channels (e.g. GCP Marketplace, AWS Marketplace) — that extend Lambda's commercial reach. Work with business development on strategic partnership opportunities that have commercial implications for Lambda Cloud revenue. Partner with marketing to identify and lock-in customer references spanning case studies, logo placements, podcasts, and other critical reusable collateral.
Qualifications
12+ years of B2B enterprise sales experience, with at least 4 years in a sales leadership role managing quota-carrying teams. Deep domain experience in cloud infrastructure, GPU compute, or AI/ML infrastructure — you understand what you're selling and can credibly engage with both technical and business buyers.
Demonstrated track record of building and scaling enterprise sales teams from an early stage, including designing territory models, compensation structures, and sales processes. Experience owning and closing large, complex deals ($10M+ TCV) with long sales cycles, multiple stakeholders, and custom commercial terms.
Strong command of pipeline management and forecasting methodology — you run disciplined reviews, understand degradation signals, and hold your team accountable to forecast accuracy.
Excellent communication and executive presence — able to represent Lambda externally at the C-suite level and internally as a peer to engineering and product leadership. Demonstrated ability to build feedback loops between sales and product, translating customer signal into actionable input rather than anecdote.
Experience in a player-coach sales model where you personally own strategic accounts while managing a team. Nice to have: Experience selling GPU cloud or HPC capacity specifically, with familiarity in how frontier AI labs and hyperscalers evaluate and procure compute. Prior exposure to neocloud or infrastructure startup environments where product gaps are real and commercial creativity is required to compete against larger, more established players. Familiarity with Nvidia ecosystem, GPU cluster economics, and how customers think about CapEx vs. opex tradeoffs for AI infrastructure. Experience structuring and selling reserved capacity or long-duration committed use agreements. Existing relationships with infrastructure decision-makers at large enterprises with AI programs. Background working alongside or within a deal desk function, with hands-on experience structuring non-standard commercial terms.