Strategic Account Executive, Frontier AI

About the role

The Strategic Account Executive, Frontier AI is a senior commercial leader responsible for building and growing relationships with leading AI labs and other organizations developing advanced foundation models. The role owns a focused portfolio of priority accounts, identifying, developing, and closing opportunities across the model training and evaluation lifecycle, including RL environments, evaluations, expert data, RLHF, coding environments, and red teaming.

Responsibilities

• Own the commercial relationship and growth strategy for a focused portfolio of priority frontier AI labs and foundation-model organizations
• Build and expand relationships across research, engineering, post-training, product, research operations, procurement, and executive leadership, owning revenue, pipeline, and long-term account growth
• Sell complex, customized services across the model development lifecycle, including RL environments, evaluations, reward and verifier-based training, RLHF, expert data, coding environments, and red-teaming
• Develop opportunities from early research conversations through pilots, scaled programs, and strategic account expansion, navigating sales cycles where scope, pricing, and delivery models are built collaboratively with the customer
• Engage directly with researchers, engineers, and technical leaders to understand the model capabilities they are seeking to improve and the challenges preventing further progress
• Maintain sufficient technical fluency across RL environments, evaluations, RLHF, expert data, and agentic systems to recognize when an exploratory research discussion represents a commercial opportunity
• Develop a high-quality pipeline through proactive relationship development and research-driven discovery, owning opportunities from identification through proposal development, negotiation, and close
• Navigate complex procurement, legal, and contracting processes while negotiating commercially attractive agreements, and drive expansion into adjacent research teams once EPAM establishes credibility
• Lead customer discovery with EPAM technical experts to translate research objectives into technically credible and commercially compelling solutions
• Cook up proposals, pilots, and statements of work that connect the customer's research objective to EPAM's proposed solution, structuring pilots with a clear path toward scaled engagements
• Build and maintain a strong professional network across the frontier AI research and model-development ecosystem, representing EPAM at key research conferences and technical gatherings
• Coordinate ecosystem engagement to stay close to emerging research priorities and help establish EPAM as a credible participant in the Frontier AI ecosystem, not simply a vendor selling into it

Requirements

• Significant experience in strategic enterprise sales, account leadership, or business development within AI, machine learning, data services, or another highly technical market
• Prior experience selling model-training, data, evaluation, or related technical services, with familiarity across RL environments, evaluations, RLHF, expert data, or red-teaming
• Demonstrated understanding of how frontier AI organizations buy, including experience navigating research, engineering, legal, procurement, and executive stakeholders
• Experience engaging directly with AI researchers and research engineers, and developing credibility with highly technical customer audiences
• Experience owning and growing strategic customer relationships into multimillion-dollar accounts through new opportunity development and long-term account planning
• Strong understanding of the current generative AI and frontier-model ecosystem, including the major organizations and commercial participants within it
• Strong commercial judgment and negotiation skills, with the ability to navigate complex contracting and procurement environments