Strategic Account Executive (West Coast)

Who we are. Solo.io is reimagining infrastructure for cloud and AI. We unite secure, seamless cloud connectivity with AI-ready, agentic infrastructure, and leading enterprises worldwide trust us to securely connect their applications, services, and AI workloads across any environment. Joining Solo means working at the center of how enterprises adopt AI: on open source projects built in the open with a global community, alongside the people who created them, for customers who are among the largest in the world. If you want to help organizations accelerate innovation, scale intelligently, and put modern AI agents to work, we’d love to meet you. Learn more at www.solo.io. About the role. We are looking for a self-motivated Enterprise Software Sales Executive with a keen sense of market trends to strategically position our products and solutions across both our cloud native connectivity and agentic AI suites. Our Account Executives find success through their deep interest in cloud native and AI technologies, possessing hunter mentalities, and their desire to help others. Candidates who thrive here are comfortable selling at the intersection of platform engineering and AI — a space moving fast and creating significant urgency in large enterprises. This role is highly specialized sales and business development in a fast-growing technology company. This role requires candidates to be based in the Bay Area / SoCal / Rockies area to effectively serve our clients and attend in-person meetings as needed. Candidates must have the ability to travel within the region. Job Description: • Own business growth and market expansion for geographic region across both the cloud native connectivity suite (Gloo Gateway, Gloo Mesh) and the agentic infrastructure suite (agentgateway, kagent, agentregistry) • Develop collaborative relationships with Customers, Solution Engineering, SDR, Engineering, Marketing, and Legal teams • Coordinate and manage prospect activities including POCs, demos, trials, and architecture reviews • Demonstrated experience successfully implementing systems and tactics that have wider impact on team • Commands the technical domain of service mesh, cloud infrastructure, AI agent infrastructure, security, and adjacent markets • Establish and implement a consistent, repeatable process; mentors peers in the process • Self-starter on staying current with fast-moving additions to Solo.io products and related technologies — including emerging AI protocols like MCP and A2A — such that you're able to converse and write about them fluently • Partner with Solutions Engineering to evangelize Solo.io products and related technology through attending speaking engagements (conferences, meetups, webinars) and promoting content (blogs, articles) as needed • Identify and engage platform engineering, AI/ML, and DevOps personas who are navigating the challenge of bringing agentic AI to production in regulated, large-scale environments Job Requirements: • Expertise in Enterprise Software Sales with cloud technologies; experience or strong familiarity with the AI infrastructure market is a significant plus • 7+ years selling to DevOps, Platform Engineering, or AI/ML personas at the enterprise level • A proven, consistent track record of exceeding quota and plan targets • Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to translate complex cloud native and AI infrastructure concepts for both technical and executive audiences • Familiarity with the Kubernetes ecosystem, open source go-to-market motions, and CNCF project dynamics • Willingness to travel up to 20% as needed What you'll love about Solo. At Solo, our culture is all about hiring great people, creating a fun and fast-paced work culture, and letting our teams work with our customers to successfully solve their challenges. Solo works collaboratively with our customers, partners, and open source communities to deliver technology innovation, architectural best-practices, and hands-on education. Solo uses a unique engagement model with our customers that allows us to quickly make them successful, and continue to work closely with them as their production environments grow — whether that's a service mesh carrying billions of API calls or an agentic AI platform trusted to act autonomously on critical infrastructure. Solo is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, or protected veteran status and will not be discriminated against on the basis of disability. The company may use AI tools to help sort applicants based on job related criteria. However, the hiring team decides who moves forward and no employment decisions are made by AI.