Why this role exists
Every deal Oplane has closed was closed by a founder. That has worked, and the motion converts well once a buyer is in it, but it does not scale past the hours in a founder’s week and none of it is written down anywhere someone else could pick up.
You are the first sales hire. For the first 6 to 12 months you carry a number yourself and close deals with your own hands. While you do that, you write down what actually works, which is the thing we do not have. Then you hire the team that runs it, and you run them.
If you want to arrive and manage an existing playbook, this is the wrong company. There isn’t one yet. You are here to write it.
What you’ll own
Everything from a qualified demo to a signed customer, and the repeatable version of it that lets the next five people do the same.
What the job actually is
- Close deals yourself, first
- Discovery, pilot design, technical evaluation, pricing conversation, security review, procurement. You will be in all of it personally before you delegate any of it.
- Build the playbook as you go
- How we qualify, what a good pilot looks like, which objections predict a loss, what moves a stalled deal. This is the actual deliverable of your first year, and it has to be good enough that someone joining in month fourteen can use it.
- Sell to a room, not a person
- Our deals touch developers, engineering leaders, AppSec, security leadership, compliance and procurement, often at companies with thousands of engineers. Your champion has to win an internal argument you are not present for, so a large part of the job is making them able to.
- Own the numbers that matter
- Demo to pilot, pilot to customer, cycle length, and why a deal moved or died. You will know your pipeline cold and you will tell us when it is thin rather than dressing it up.
- Shape pricing and packaging
- You are closest to the moment a buyer decides the price is or is not defensible, so what you learn there goes straight back into how we sell and what we charge.
- Then build the team
- Hiring, ramping and leading the first reps, running alongside the outbound work we already have in motion. We expect that to start early rather than after a polite waiting period.
Who this is for
- At least 4 years in B2B sales, and a real stretch of that closing enterprise deals with your own name on them. This is not a first leadership role and it is not a role for someone early in their career.
- You have carried a real number at a startup or scale-up and hit it. Enterprise experience matters, a purely enterprise-corporate career does not fit here.
- You have sold a technical product to a technical buyer and you can hold your own in the conversation without a solutions engineer next to you.
- You are genuinely happy doing hands-on selling for the first six to twelve months, and you want to build a team fast in parallel rather than instead.
- Your network is not confined to one home market. UK and US reach is a strong plus.
- You understand agentic systems at a level that lets you talk credibly with the people building them. You do not need to be an engineer, you do need to know what an agent actually does and why securing one is hard.
- Ex-founder is a real advantage. So is anyone who has built a function from nothing before.
- Working language is English.
How we work
Small team, ten of us today, real autonomy, and nothing between deciding something and doing it. We are honest about what is hard, including in this ad. We grow through agents rather than headcount, so the job is always to build the system that does the work rather than do the work by hand forever. Nobody here asks permission first. If you see it, do it, and tell us afterwards.
Our mission is to fix software for good. Security expertise should be software rather than a person you book time with, and that is a big enough problem to spend a career on.
What you get
- A product with paying customers, real enterprise logos and a sales motion that already converts. Teams like Miro, Tandem Health, Remotive Labs and Lightbringer already run Oplane, and we are SOC 2 certified.
- Full ownership of sales.
- Backed by Seed Capital and Icebreaker.vc, with angel investors from Neo4j and Google, including Emil Eifrem. $5.2M seed.
- On-site five days a week, in either Stockholm or Malmö. This is an in-person team by design, not a distributed one. Most of the team sits in Malmö and we get everyone in a room regularly.