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Scalar

Founding Account Executive

San Francisco, CA, United StatesUnited States
FullTime · Sales
POSTED 31 AUG
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Role
70 days opentrue age
Posted 31 Aug
Payats field
$125k–250kposted
▲ +20% vs market median $157k
$100k$250k
Market p25–p75
$100k–$210k
SF Bay Area · n=2435 · 365d to 6 Nov
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All tracked boards · live 10 Nov · n=416,810

About Scalar:

Building on a great API is one of the best feelings in software — every interface you want is right there, and it all just works. Building on a bad one is the opposite: out-of-date docs, no SDK in your language, no MCP server. We started Scalar to fix that.

We're a small team (around ten engineers and designers) who wear a lot of hats and obsess over our craft. We think every company deserves Stripe-level docs, SDKs, and MCP servers from day zero — not just the ones with a platform team to build them. Open-source is in our DNA: our whole team contributes to and maintains repositories across the API ecosystem, including the standards everyone relies on, like OpenAPI.

We keep things lean and move without layers of process — engineers pick up problems, talk to each other, and ship. We're looking for owners with high agency: people who see what needs doing and do it. If you do your best work with a lot of autonomy and very little ego, you'll feel at home here.

Right now, every deal at Scalar closes because Marc, our CEO, personally closed it. He finds the account, writes the first email, runs the call, goes deep on the technical evaluation, negotiates the contract, and onboards the team. That's founder-led sales end to end, and it's worked — it's how we got Zoom, Clerk, Warp, and Profound.

It also doesn't scale, which is why this role exists.

You'll be our first Account Executive and the first person other than the founder to own a deal from first call to signature. You're joining a sales team being built right now: two SDRs at the front of the funnel, a founding Solutions Engineer on the technical side, and Marc, who has been doing all four jobs at once. You take the closing half off his plate.

Be clear-eyed about what that means. There is a motion here and it demonstrably works — but it is Marc's, it lives largely in his head, and it has never been run by anyone else. There is no playbook, no close plan template, no discovery framework, no competitive battlecard, no forecast anyone trusts. The first quarter of this job is learning how Marc sells by sitting next to him while he does it. The rest of it is turning that into something a fifth and tenth rep can run — and being the person who proves that a Scalar deal closes when the founder isn't in the room.

If you've been waiting for the job where you build how a company sells rather than execute how it already does, this is that job. If you want a territory, a quota, and a manager who tells you what good looks like, this is not.

Who we sell to

Our buyers are engineers, and the product is the proof. Zoom's developer documentation runs on Scalar. So does Clerk's — a company whose docs were already a competitive advantage, which makes them exactly the kind of customer with no reason to switch unless the thing is genuinely better. Warp and Profound ship SDKs we generate from their OpenAPI documents, in every language their users ask for.

Those are the rooms you'll be in: platform teams, API teams, and the staff engineer who has strong opinions about their spec and is not going to be charmed. They don't want a deck, they don't want a discovery call that's really a qualification interrogation, and they will know within two minutes whether you understand what they build.

Which is the thing that makes this an unusual AE job: you cannot win these deals on relationship and process alone. You need enough command of the product and the category to be useful in a technical conversation, know when to bring the Solutions Engineer in, and know what you can promise. Most of these are displacements — teams already on Redocly, Mintlify, Stoplight, ReadMe, or a homegrown docs site that one engineer maintains resentfully. Winning means making the switch feel obviously worth it to the person who has to do the migration.

What you'll work on

Closing — owning deals from first call through signature: discovery, the technical evaluation, pricing, security review, procurement, and the close. Sourced by our SDRs, by inbound, by our open-source footprint, and handed over from Marc

Source · ScalarFirst seen 7 NovOriginal ↗