Area Vice President, Public Sector

ABOUT US Sierra is the leading platform for customer-facing AI agents, working with many of the world's biggest brands — including The GAP, Rocket Mortgage, SoFi, Sutter Health, and SoftBank — to transform how they serve customers and grow their businesses. We are primarily an in-person company based in San Francisco, with growing offices across North America, Europe, and Asia. We are guided by a set of values that are at the core of our actions and define our culture: Trust, Customer Obsession, Craftsmanship, Intensity, and a commitment to balancing Family along the way. These values are the foundation of our work, and we are committed to upholding them in everything we do. Sierra was co-founded by Bret Taylor https://www.linkedin.com/in/brettaylor/ and Clay Bavor https://www.linkedin.com/in/claybavor/ who first met while working together at Google over 20 years ago. Bret currently serves as Chairman of the Board of Open AI. Previously, he was co-CEO of Salesforce and CTO of Facebook. Clay spent 18 years at Google, where he most recently led Google Labs. ABOUT THE PUBLIC SECTOR TEAM - Sierra recently received FedRAMP High https://sierra.ai/blog/certified-fedramp-high certification and were awarded our first contract with a federal agency. We’re now building our founding public sector team to redefine the relationship between the government and its citizenry. - Today, our agents already enable citizens to access social services, report fraud, and understand complex government systems. Simultaneously, they empower government officials to better hear the concerns and inquiries of their constituencies. - We are explicitly nonpartisan and committed to empowering public servants to leverage AI to advance their important missions. - In our journey, we are guided by a set of values that are at the core of our actions and define our culture: Trust, Customer Obsession, Craftsmanship, Intensity, and Family. These values are the foundation of our work, and we are committed to upholding them in everything we do. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Build and lead Sierra’s public sector sales team: Recruit, develop, and lead a team of account executives serving strategic federal, state, or local government accounts. Set clear expectations, coach for performance, and build a culture of customer obsession, accountability, and consistent execution. - Own revenue growth and territory strategy: Translate Sierra’s public sector ambitions into territory coverage, account priorities, pipeline goals, and revenue plans. Allocate resources thoughtfully, maintain rigorous forecasts, and drive the team to consistently achieve or exceed revenue targets. - Create opportunities around mission outcomes: Build executive relationships with agency leaders and help your team translate priorities such as constituent access, service delivery, workforce effectiveness, and program integrity into compelling AI agent opportunities. Serve as an executive sponsor for strategic accounts. - Guide complex sales cycles from discovery through award: Coach account executives through long, multi-stakeholder government buying processes and engage directly at critical moments. Mobilize cross-functional support for executive alignment, solution development, business cases, security and legal reviews, pricing, proposal strategy, negotiation, and close. - Shape acquisition and capture strategy: Ensure every priority opportunity has a credible path to contract and a disciplined capture plan. Help the team navigate funding, fiscal-year timing, competitive dynamics, and procurement pathways—including GSA schedules, GWACs, IDIQs, BPAs, state schedules, and cooperative purchasing agreements. Lead deal reviews that surface risks early and turn strategy into clear next steps. - Scale Sierra’s partner ecosystem: Partner with public sector and partnerships leadership to build productive relationships with prime contractors, systems integrators, resellers, distributors, small-business partners, and technology providers. Guide decisions about direct sales, subcontracting, teaming, and partner-led transactions to expand customer access and accelerate growth. - Lead strategic prime and teaming relationships: Establish executive alignment with key partners and help shape account ownership, deal registration, workshare, and joint go-to-market plans. Ensure partnerships bring meaningful customer access, past performance, implementation capacity, or procurement pathways—and translate into qualified pipeline and successful delivery. - Drive disciplined pursuit and proposal decisions: Partner with the Public Sector GM on bid/no-bid recommendations and prioritize resources across strategic pursuits. Align sales, legal, security, product, engineering, and delivery teams to produce procurement responses that are compliant, differentiated, and precise. - Stay accountable for customer success: Build trust with senior agency leaders, establish strong handoffs from sales to delivery, and remain engaged through deployment and expansion. Help resolve escalations and ensure commitments made during the sales process support lasting customer relationships. - Build a repeatable public sector go-to-market motion: Work with public sector leadership to refine account segmentation, hiring and capacity plans, capture processes, partner strategy, contract-vehicle priorities, and sales playbooks. Bring market signals and customer feedback to product and company leadership to shape Sierra’s platform and public sector strategy. - Lead an AI-native sales organization: Embed AI into how the team researches accounts, develops outreach, synthesizes calls, plans opportunities, creates proposals, and forecasts. Model effective use, share successful practices, and help account executives spend more time on judgment, strategy, and customer relationships. WHAT YOU'LL BRING - 15+ years of selling experience: Extensive experience in enterprise customer-facing sales role, specifically selling to the U.S. government. - People leadership experience: 10+ years managing, mentoring, and developing a high-performing enterprise sales team. - Enterprise experience: You've run and managed end-to-end complex deals ($1M+). - Strong fluency in government acquisition and procurement, including funding and budget cycles, competitive solicitations, proposal processes, task orders, and common Federal or state contract vehicles. - Experience developing and executing capture strategies before a solicitation is released—not simply responding once an RFP is public. - A strong network and demonstrated ability to work with government technology partners, including prime contractors, systems integrators, resellers, distributors, and small-business teaming partners. - Sound judgment about direct, channel, prime/subcontractor, and teaming models, with the ability to select and execute the right path for a particular agency and opportunity. - The ability to build credibility with agency executiv