Founding Sales Development Representative - job 3 of 5

Let the Builders Build

Engineers spend 50-70% of their time chasing alerts, fighting fires, answering the same questions, and monitoring releases. TierZero deploys AI agents that handle this production work end-to-end, so engineering teams can ship. The result: 40% faster incident resolution, 7,000+ engineering hours saved per year, and customers who say "I cannot live without TierZero."

We've raised $7M from Accel and SV Angel and are trusted by companies like Discord, Drata, and WeightWatchers. Now we need our first SDR to build the outbound engine that turns a massive market opportunity into a qualified pipeline.

The Role

You will be TierZero's first outbound hire. Today, our CEO runs the full sales cycle from cold outreach through signed contracts. The closing motion is working. What we need is someone who wakes up every morning obsessed with filling the top of the funnel.

You won't inherit a playbook, a lead list, or an inbound firehose. You'll build all of it. You'll work directly with the CEO to figure out what messaging lands, which personas convert, and how to create a pipeline from nothing. Every sequence you write, every call you make, and every meeting you book will shape how TierZero sells for years to come.

What You'll Do

Create pipeline from scratch

• Cold call, cold email, and creatively prospect into engineering orgs at Series C+ companies. "Give me a list and I'll make something happen" is the energy we're looking for.

• Research target accounts, map org charts, and find the right entry points - the Engineering Manager who feels on-call pain daily, the VP Eng evaluating AI tooling, the Staff Engineer who's skeptical but curious

• Build multi-step outbound sequences, test messaging angles and CTAs, and iterate fast based on what's working

• Use customer language ("murder mystery finding the right person") over marketing language ("knowledge management solution") - our best outbound sounds like an engineer talking to an engineer

Build the outbound motion alongside the founding team

• Define and refine ICP, personas, and buying triggers through experimentation, not guesswork

• Develop qualification frameworks: what makes a meeting worth booking vs. a polite pass

• Establish dashboards, KPIs, and a predictable pipeline creation motion

• Document what works so it's repeatable - by you, then eventually by the team you help hire

Become a domain expert

• Learn enough about observability, incident management, Kubernetes, and CI/CD to have real conversations with technical buyers

• Understand the competitive landscape: how we differ from Datadog Bits AI, PagerDuty, incident.io, and the "we'll build it ourselves" objection

• Sit in on demos and customer calls to sharpen your understanding of what resonates and why deals close

Who You Are

You're a self-sourcer. You don't wait for marketing to hand you leads. You've got war stories about creative ways you've generated pipeline - not just stories about running someone else's sequences. When we ask "how would you create pipeline here?", your answer is specific, scrappy, and starts with what you'd do in week one. Not "I'll leverage my network."

You thrive in environments where process doesn't exist yet. There's no sales enablement team, no polished battle cards, no SDR manager checking your activity metrics. You see that as the opportunity, not the obstacle.

You're competitive, and your competitiveness shows up as relentless effort and creative problem-solving. You want to be the person who built TierZero's outbound engine from zero, not the person who inherited a working motion at employee #200.

Requirements

• Proven self-sourcing ability. You've created a pipeline through your own outreach, not just worked inbound leads or ran pre-built sequences. We will ask for specific examples and numbers.

• Cold calling experience and willingness to pick up the phone. Non-negotiable. Email alone doesn't build pipeline fast enough at our stage.

• Experience prospecting into technical buyers: engineering leaders, SREs, DevOps, platform teams, or similar

• Startup or early-stage experience strongly preferred; you've prospected without a full marketing team or brand recognition behind you

Traits

• Genuinely curious. You dig into the "why" behind a prospect's pain and can articulate it back to them better than they said it.

• Builder mentality. You think about what's working, iterate on what isn't, and treat your outbound process like a product you're shipping.

• Competitive. Whether it's athletics, gaming, music, or something else, you have a history of grinding to get better at things that matter to you.

• High agency. You identify next steps without waiting for instructions. You see a gap and fill it.

• Technically credible. You can learn the language fast enough to earn trust from an engineer in a cold call.

Nice to Have

• Prospected into the observability, incident management, DevOps, or developer tools space

• Familiarity with Datadog, PagerDuty, Sentry, or similar tools

• Experience at a company where you built outbound from zero, not inherited a working motion

• You've been the first or second SDR hire somewhere before

• Familiarity with tools like Apollo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, or similar prospecting platforms

Highlights

• Team: Founding team includes staff and principal engineers from Facebook, Databricks, LangChain, and Brex. CEO is a 2x founder; CTO led AI initiatives to $300M+ revenue at Databricks.

• Customers: Discord, Drata, Eaze, WeightWatchers, and many more. Customers consistently volunteer as references.

• Product: AI agents that investigate incidents in ~7 minutes (vs. 40 min manual), answer 80%+ of routine infrastructure questions, and take real action: rollbacks, restarts, fix PRs. Deployed on-prem for regulated industries. Industry's only 95% accuracy guarantee.

• Funding: Backed by Accel and SV Angel, early investors in Facebook, Atlassian, Slack, and Stripe.

Our Values

• Give Trust and Opinions. We trust each other to execute independently and speak up with ideas and concerns. Challenge ideas openly, debate decisions, assume positive intent. No micromanagement, no politics.

• Be the Customer. Everyone talks directly to customers. We build with empathy and deliver more value than we charge for. When customers walk away from a conversation with us, they should wish we were on their team.

• Love the Journey. Startups are hard. We're here because we enjoy building something meaningful together. We're anti-996 and believe in sustainable pace.

• Build Intentionally. Move quickly, but with focus and purpose. Think through decisions, debate the right approach, then execute sharply. Less hype, more substance.

• Everything is Figureoutable. Default to optimism and creative problem-solving. The answers aren't always obvious in a rapidly evolving space, and that's okay. We'll find a way forward.

Benefits

• Medical, Dental, Vision insurance

• 401(k)

• Lunch & Dinner in the office

• Snacks and drinks

• M5 macbook + iPad Air

• Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf, and unlimited budget to test out new software and models