Account Executive, Enterprise Sales, Federal Practice

Scope of the Role: 

Opens and carries enterprise accounts serving government end customers: defense prime contractors, systems integrators, and security and autonomy companies. The funding target is company-funded research and development and other internally funded engineering work, not program-funded subcontract scope. The position sells defined engagements against a stated deliverable and carries them to signature.

This is a sales position. It carries a revenue quota and closes commercial agreements. It does not perform capture; solicitation response, proposal management, and teaming negotiation remain with the Director of Capture and the VP Business Development.

What the Position Sells

Innodata’s federal practice supplies the data and evaluation layer beneath AI systems: corpus triage and curation, dataset engineering and release, and independent model and agent evaluation. Innodata holds no model equity and no platform stake, which is the basis of the independence argument when a customer has already committed to a model vendor and needs evaluation performed by a party with no interest in the result.

What You’ll Own:

• Opens and owns prime engineering and chief technology organizations, working from a target account list maintained by Business Development.
• Identifies the buying center and the funding source at each account, and confirms both before committing pursuit effort.
• Converts qualified conversations into paid scoping engagements: data readiness assessments, corpus audits, and evaluation runs against customer-furnished data.
• Works with the Solutions Architect to produce dataset specifications and rough order of magnitude estimates. Retains the customer relationship rather than transferring it to engineering.
• Carries non-disclosure agreements, master services agreements, and statements of work to signature.
• Escalates any matter touching a federal contract vehicle to capture.
• Maintains account and opportunity records in Salesforce, including stage discipline and close-date accuracy.

You’ll Thrive in This Role If You Have:

• Five to ten years selling technical services into large enterprises against a revenue quota, with attainment history the candidate can state in figures.
• At least one first engagement closed at a net-new account the candidate opened cold, rather than growth of an inherited account.
• Sustained experience selling to engineering and chief technology organizations rather than to procurement.
• Sale of services priced on labor and deliverables rather than on seats or licenses.
• Ownership of NDAs, master services agreements, and statements of work through signature.
• Demonstrated account expansion beyond an initial scope.
• Bachelor’s degree in engineering, a technical discipline, or business with a demonstrated record of selling technical services.

Preferred Qualifications: 

• Direct selling experience into defense primes, systems integrators, or large regulated enterprises.
• Working knowledge of how company-funded research and development is planned and recovered as an allowable indirect cost, and how prime fiscal calendars govern when a proposal must arrive to be funded.
• Experience selling where the buyer’s budget competes against internal headcount rather than against another vendor.
• Experience converting a paid assessment or pilot into a production engagement.
• Passage of a prime supplier qualification or vendor onboarding process.
• Sufficient command of dataset engineering and model evaluation to qualify an opportunity before engineering is engaged.
• Familiarity with federal contract vehicles sufficient to recognize when a matter escalates to capture.
• Master of Business Administration or a technical Master of Science. An advanced degree does not substitute for account access.