Sales Lead, North America
Posted
About QuestDB
QuestDB is the low-latency time-series database on open formats. It ingests millions of events per second, computes on live data in milliseconds, and keeps years of history queryable: one SQL engine spanning messaging, stream processing and tiered storage, so teams can act on what is happening and learn from everything that happened.
Our open-source repository has passed 17k GitHub stars and we're the fastest-growing database in our category. QuestDB runs in production at tier-1 banks, exchanges, trading firms, hedge funds, crypto platforms and energy operators across four continents, and is expanding into robotics, aerospace and Physical AI. We recently won Best Trading Analytics Platform at the TradingTech Summit Europe, the first non-legacy vendor to do so.
Working at QuestDB
We hire talented and passionate people who share our mission to empower developers to solve their problems with data. We are building breakthrough technology to power the infrastructure of tomorrow.
- Work with world-class engineers, including two teammates who placed in the top 10 of the One Billion Row Challenge (1BRC).
- We invest in a culture that promotes ownership, autonomy and independent thinking.
- We have transparent leadership and value employees' strategic input.
- Our team is ambitious and tackles the most difficult problems at the deepest data infrastructure layer.
The role
We're hiring a sales lead for North America, based in New York. Your primary focus will be financial services and capital markets (banks, asset managers, trading firms, exchanges, digital-asset platforms), while also pursuing high-potential opportunities in adjacent data-intensive sectors such as energy, aerospace and defense.
This is a hands-on, execution-focused role. For the first phase you operate as an individual contributor and closer: building your own pipeline into named accounts, running technical enterprise sales cycles with a pre-sales engineer alongside you, guiding prospects through evaluation and procurement, and representing QuestDB in key customer conversations. As we prove repeatability, you take the lead in building and managing the North America sales team.
You work directly with our co-founder and CEO, who splits his time between New York and London, and with the sales team in London, our CTO and the core engineering team.
Responsibilities
- Own full-cycle enterprise sales for QuestDB Enterprise in North America: qualification, discovery, evaluation, commercial negotiation and close.
- Build your own pipeline in the territory: pick the accounts that matter, know why each one should buy, and get in front of the people who own the data through customers, partners, referrals and events. Outreach is targeted at the right person, not mass email campaigns.
- Run discovery that turns the lights on before anyone talks about price.
- Run technical sales cycles together with a pre-sales engineer and the core engineering team: evaluations, proofs of concept with written success criteria, and architecture and integration discussions with engineering, architecture and data teams.
- Hold the technical line: know the product well enough to answer the first layer of questions accurately, and bring in an engineer for the next layer.
- Negotiate from value and scope rather than from a discount, and keep pricing consistent across accounts.
- Build a predictable, metrics-driven sales process: clean pipeline in the CRM, honest forecasts, structured qualification, and a dated next step on every open deal.
- Expand existing North America accounts by finding new use cases, teams and workloads where QuestDB can be adopted.
- Represent QuestDB in North America through in-person meetings, industry conferences and targeted events in hubs such as New York, Chicago and Toronto.
- Feed the market back into the company: what buyers ask for, what competitors say, what wins and what loses, so product and go-to-market improve with every cycle.
- As we scale, hire, coach and manage the North America sales team.
Requirements
- Based in New York City or willing to relocate.
- 5+ years of enterprise software sales experience, with a strong background in technical products and data infrastructure.
- A proven track record selling complex technical products to engineering, architecture and data teams, with numbers you can show: quota, attainment, deal sizes, win rate, and how much of your pipeline you sourced yourself.
- A hands-on closer who runs and closes enterprise sales cycles independently, and has done so at an early-stage company without a large team around them.
- Technically credible: comfortable discussing databases, data pipelines and deployment architectures with engineers, and able to run a discovery call alone with a sceptical technical buyer.
- A disciplined operator: clean CRM, honest forecasts, written next steps, and a habit of reviewing your own calls.
Nice to have
- Sold into trading, market-data, risk or quant teams.
- Sold a database, data platform, streaming or market-data product, and won against an incumbent.
- Built a territory or a team from scratch at a Series A or B company.
- An engineering or quantitative background.
What we offer
- Competitive base salary plus uncapped commission
- Generous equity options package
- Flexible working hours
- Freedom of choice for your technical equipment
- Wonderful, highly qualified colleagues
- Truly international: more than 10 different nationalities
- A transparent, collaborative and inclusive culture
- Exciting opportunities for career progression as we grow
- High autonomy and trust, with minimal bureaucracy and a collaborative environment
How to apply
In your application, include a short note on why this role, a one-page summary of your track record (quota, attainment, deal sizes, and the pipeline you sourced yourself), and one North America account you would open first and why.