GTM Lead
Deccan AI
- Experience
- 1–8 years
- Location
- San Francisco Bay Area, US; Delhi NCR / Gurugram; Hyderabad preferred (Bengaluru acceptable) · On-site
- Job type
- To be confirmed before publication
- AI research fluency
- Technical communication
- Prospecting
- Outreach
- Relationship building
- Discovery conversations
- Account mapping
- CRM record keeping
About the role
Open doors with prospective AI labs and enterprise clients through targeted outreach. Turn initial outreach into qualified client meetings and commercial opportunities. Build and deepen relationships with AI researchers and enterprise stakeholders. Translate Deccan AI's technical research and offerings into accurate client-facing messages. Acquire new client logos in the Bay Area market. Expand coverage and opportunities within India enterprise accounts. Generate US market opportunities while operating from India. Feed recurring client needs and market signals back to research, product, and leadership.
What you’ll do
- Stay close to Deccan AI's research, product releases, datasets, evaluations, and other relevant capabilities
- Discuss technical requirements with researchers and engineering stakeholders, ask precise questions, and bring in internal specialists when deeper expertise is needed
- Translate technical work into clear, accurate client messages, use cases, presentations, and outreach without overstating capabilities
- Research target AI labs, technology companies, and enterprise teams
- Identify relevant researchers, technical leaders, and stakeholders involved in evaluating or purchasing AI solutions
- Build account maps and targeted prospect lists based on research priorities, product needs, and potential relevance to Deccan AI's offerings
- Initiate personalised outreach through appropriate channels, including professional networks, email, introductions, and direct meetings
What we’re looking for
Must have
- AI research fluency
- Technical communication
- Prospecting
- Outreach
- Relationship building
- Discovery conversations
Nice to have
- Go-to-market
- Business development
- Technical sales
- Partnerships
- Customer development
- Startup experience
What makes this role challenging
- Sustaining credible technical conversations with AI researchers and engineering stakeholders
- Opening doors and creating opportunities without relying on inbound leads
- Handling repeated outreach and rejection while maintaining persistence
- Operating in a fast-moving environment where the approach must evolve as new offerings are released
- Coordinating across US and India account teams and time zones
- Explaining complex AI capabilities accurately without overstating them
What success looks like
- First 30 days
- Ramped on Deccan AI's research, offerings, and target accounts; began personalised outreach and built initial prospect lists.
- By 90 days
- Running discovery conversations, coordinating technical discussions, and generating qualified client meetings through own outreach.
- First year
- Created new client logos or expanded account coverage, advanced opportunities to commercial milestones, and fed market signals back to research and leadership.
About Deccan AI
Deccan AI is a venture-backed company founded in 2023/2024 that delivers human-curated training and evaluation data for AI models, serving frontier labs and enterprises such as Google and Snowflake. Its platform spans STARK RL environments, Helix evals, and EnterpriseOS agents, supported by a network of over 1.2 million experts. The company has raised $25M in total funding, including a Series A in March 2026.
AI training data / post-training data, RL environments, evals, and agents · Series A · 51-200 employees (LinkedIn shows 552; TechCrunch reports ~125)
Technical GTM and Business Development
Deccan AI | 1 to 8 years of experience | Draft for hiring team review
This role develops business for Deccan AI by understanding its research and offerings, identifying relevant AI researchers and enterprise stakeholders, and turning targeted outreach into client relationships and commercial opportunities. The brief covers three location and market variants of the same core mandate.
About Deccan AI
Deccan AI helps frontier AI labs and enterprises improve AI model performance through training data, reinforcement learning environments, evaluations, and agents. Its offerings include human curated datasets and expert feedback across areas such as coding, multimodal AI, model alignment, and agentic workflows. This role connects those capabilities with the teams that need them.
The opportunity
We are looking for technically fluent, commercially driven professionals who can learn what we are researching and shipping, identify where it is useful, and proactively open doors with prospective clients. You will work closely with technical colleagues to explain our capabilities accurately and develop opportunities with AI research teams and enterprise accounts.
Prior sales or go to market experience is valuable, but it is not mandatory. We are open to people from technical, product, research, startup, or adjacent backgrounds who demonstrate strong communication, persistence, relationship building, and a clear desire to win business.
Location and market variants
Variant
Base
Primary focus
Bay Area client development
San Francisco Bay Area, US
Work directly with clients and acquire new client logos.
India enterprise account coverage
Delhi NCR / Gurugram
Develop relationships with India based client teams, including local offices of global technology companies.
Us market development from India
Hyderabad preferred; Bengaluru acceptable
Build business with US based clients while operating from India. US travel is optional, subject to company arrangements and eligibility.
The audio indicates approximately 2 to 3 Bay Area opportunities, one Delhi NCR opportunity, and multiple India based opportunities. Final headcount and level are to be confirmed.
Key responsibilities
The responsibilities below expand the audio brief into a working JD. Commercial process ownership beyond opening doors and developing accounts should be confirmed with the hiring team.
Understand our research and offerings
Stay close to Deccan AI’s research, product releases, datasets, evaluations, and other relevant capabilities. Understand what each offering enables and which client problems it addresses.
Discuss technical requirements with researchers and engineering stakeholders, ask precise questions, and bring in internal specialists when deeper expertise is needed.
Translate technical work into clear, accurate client messages, use cases, presentations, and outreach without overstating capabilities.
Identify and engage relevant buyers
Research target AI labs, technology companies, and enterprise teams. Identify relevant researchers, technical leaders, and stakeholders involved in evaluating or purchasing AI solutions.
Build account maps and targeted prospect lists based on research priorities, product needs, and potential relevance to Deccan AI’s offerings.
Initiate personalised outreach through appropriate channels, including professional networks, email, introductions, and direct meetings. Use relevant research and recent releases to make conversations specific.
Follow up consistently, handle rejection constructively, test different approaches, and create new opportunities without relying entirely on inbound leads.
Develop client relationships and opportunities
Run initial discovery conversations to understand the client’s problem, current approach, technical needs, stakeholders, and next steps.
Coordinate technical discussions, demonstrations, and solution exploration with Deccan AI’s research and delivery teams.
Develop relationships across target accounts, identify additional teams or use cases, and advance opportunities through agreed next steps.
For India account coverage, coordinate with US account teams while independently building relationships with India based client stakeholders.
Maintain execution discipline
Maintain clear records of outreach, meetings, stakeholder relationships, client requirements, and opportunity progress using the company’s agreed systems.
Share recurring client needs, objections, and market signals with research, product, and leadership teams.
Support proposals, scoping, and handoff where required. Final responsibility for pricing, negotiation, contracts, and closure will depend on the role’s agreed remit.
Required capabilities
1 to 8 years of professional experience. This is a hands on individual contributor mandate; the brief does not seek very senior sales leaders.
Strong technical fluency and the ability to quickly understand complex AI related research, products, and client requirements. You should be able to sustain a credible conversation with technical stakeholders.
Commercial motivation: an interest in finding customers, initiating conversations, developing relationships, and creating business opportunities.
Persistence, resilience, and comfort with repeated outreach, rejection, and follow up.
Strong written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain technical ideas clearly and tailor the message to the audience.
Confidence initiating conversations with unfamiliar people and building trust with researchers, technical teams, and business stakeholders.
High ownership and the ability to execute in a fast moving environment where the approach may need to evolve as new offerings are released.
Ability to work from the location relevant to the selected variant and meet the associated client interaction expectations.
Preferred experience and signals
Previous go to market, business development, technical sales, partnerships, customer development, or related commercial exposure.
Prior startup experience, especially where you had to learn quickly, operate with limited structure, and take responsibility for outcomes.
A strong technical education or equivalent evidence of analytical ability and technical depth. IIT and BITS backgrounds are specifically useful signals in the brief; an IIT network is described as an advantage, not a mandatory condition.
Exposure to AI products, research, model development, evaluations, datasets, or enterprise AI use cases. Specific expertise should be assessed against the offering the person will cover.
Evidence of independently opening doors, organising a community, securing partnerships, persuading stakeholders, or acquiring users or customers.
An existing network among AI researchers, technology professionals, founders, or enterprise stakeholders.
Who may be a strong fit
Candidates may come from technical business development, AI startup GTM, product, engineering, research, technical consulting, or founder and early employee backgrounds. Technical candidates without formal sales experience should demonstrate commercial drive and credible examples of persuasion and persistent execution.
A sales title alone is insufficient evidence of fit. Assess technical understanding, learning speed, initiative, and the ability to engage researchers. The brief does not establish coding, model training, an MBA, a PhD, or prior quota ownership as mandatory requirements.
Expectations by location
Bay Area client development
Be physically based in the Bay Area and work directly with client teams. Build new relationships, meet relevant stakeholders, and create opportunities with new client organisations. Local employment arrangements, work authorisation requirements, and any relocation support must be confirmed before publishing this variant.
Delhi NCR enterprise account coverage
Be based where you can actively cover Gurugram and nearby client offices. The audio names Google and Microsoft offices in Gurugram as examples of account coverage targets and identifies Google as an existing client. Build India relationships and coordinate account context with the US coverage team. Public account naming should be approved by Deccan AI.
Us market development from India
Operate from Hyderabad, preferably, or Bengaluru, and build relationships with US based researchers and client stakeholders. The working schedule should accommodate the required US client interaction window; exact hours are to be confirmed. Existing US travel capability is helpful but is not mandatory in the audio brief.
Suggested success measures
These measures are recommendations for defining performance, not quotas specified in the audio. Numeric targets and assessment periods should be agreed after the market and account scope are confirmed.
Demonstrated understanding of Deccan AI’s research and offerings, reflected in accurate messaging and useful client conversations.
Coverage of relevant stakeholders in target accounts and a growing set of substantive researcher and buyer relationships.
Qualified client meetings and opportunities created through the person’s own outreach.
Progress from initial engagement to discovery, technical evaluation, proposal, or another agreed commercial milestone.
New client logos for the Bay Area variant; deeper local coverage and new opportunities within India accounts for the Delhi NCR variant; US opportunities generated from India for the third variant.
Clear opportunity records, consistent follow up, and actionable feedback to technical and leadership teams.
Details to confirm before publication
Final role title and level; compensation and variable pay; employment type; reporting line; location and office attendance; exact headcount; US overlap hours; work authorisation and travel arrangements; ownership of pricing, negotiation, and closure; assigned accounts and offerings; performance targets; application channel.
Draft basis: WhatsApp hiring brief dated 5 October 2026. Role title, expanded responsibilities, candidate background examples, and success measures are drafting recommendations. They should not be treated as additional requirements stated in the recording.