Founding Account Manager

Focus Deep Labs builds AI Participants: high-fidelity digital twins of real people, used by enterprise research teams to get fast, accurate answers from audiences that are normally slow, expensive, or impossible to reach. Enterprise teams can ask thousands of their actual customers anything, instantly, rather than commissioning slow, expensive research that arrives too late to matter.
Our founding team is rare: we pair deep market-research expertise (one founder built and ran the research agency Vital Findings) with serious technical pedigree (another is ex-Shazam, Apple, and Google). We already work with Fortune 500 companies, and we're backed by the Perplexity Fund.
Our customers need frequent, thoughtful partnership - and this role will be central to turning successful pilots into long-term, expanding relationships.
What you'll do:
Own the customer journey after the sale. Take each account from a clean handoff through onboarding, adoption, renewal, and expansion. You are accountable for whether customers get value and stay with Focus.
Turn pilots into long-term subscriptions. Define the success plan up front, keep every pilot moving, capture proof of value, and build the internal case that helps a champion secure broader commitment.
Run a high-touch account cadence. Lead weekly or bi-weekly check-ins, working sessions, training, and business reviews. Follow through quickly, anticipate what clients need next, and make Focus feel like an extension of their team.
Be a hands-on research partner. Help clients frame the right questions, design high-quality work in Focus, interpret outputs, and translate what they learn into clear business implications.
Grow strategic accounts. Build relationships across insights, product, marketing, CX, and senior leadership; identify new teams and use cases; and partner with the CEO and sales lead on renewals, proposals, and expansion.
Manage account health rigorously. Maintain success plans, stakeholder maps, next steps, usage and risk signals, and accurate CRM records. Surface risks early and lead the recovery plan.
Build the function with us. Create the onboarding, pilot, business-review, renewal, and expansion playbooks that let us scale without losing the high-touch experience. Bring a structured voice of the customer into Product and Engineering.
Who You Are:
You're a relationship builder who earns trust quickly. Clients see you as someone who understands their business, not a vendor checking in.
You understand research and marketing. You know what makes a good research question, a sound approach, and an insight people can act on - and you enjoy getting into the work.
You're commercially minded. You can spot expansion potential, have direct conversations about value and budget, and move an opportunity forward without making the relationship feel transactional.
You're proactive and exceptionally organized. You can keep a fast-growing portfolio moving, close loops, and make sure nothing important slips.
You're comfortable introducing a new way of working. You can teach, persuade, and guide clients through the change from episodic research to always-on access to their customers.
You're AI-fluent. You use AI to prepare, synthesize, personalize follow-up, and improve your own workflow, while knowing where human judgment matters.
You thrive in low-ego, early-stage environments. You move quickly, own outcomes, and build the process when no playbook exists.
What We're Looking For:
4+ years of relevant experience in client-facing market research, insights technology, customer success, account management, or consulting.
A track record of owning enterprise client relationships and driving onboarding, adoption, retention, pilot conversion, renewals, or expansion.
Commercial experience. You have identified and qualified growth opportunities and contributed directly to renewal, proposal, pricing, or upsell conversations.
Experience working with complex, multi-stakeholder organizations; Fortune 500 clients and executive audiences are strongly preferred.
Excellent facilitation, written communication, and executive presentation skills, with the judgment to translate research and product capabilities into business value.
Strong operational discipline with CRM and customer-success tools, account planning, and project management. Experience in research technology or B2B SaaS, comfort with AI-enabled products, and willingness to travel periodically are strongly preferred.
Life at Focus
Compensation. Competitive base salary, performance-based variable compensation tied to retention and account growth, and meaningful founding equity.
Backed by the best. Funded by the Perplexity Fund, with a founding team that blends market-research depth (Vital Findings) and technical pedigree (ex-Shazam, Apple, Google). We have the credibility, the relationships, and the ambition to go the distance.
A product you'll help customers make indispensable. We've converted every pilot customer we've targeted, and we believe deeply in the vision to scale Focus.
Room to grow. As our founding account-management hire, you'll define how Focus onboards, retains, and grows customers. As we scale, you'll have the opportunity to build and lead the team beneath you. It's scrappy to start.
Remote-first, with travel. Work from anywhere in the US, travel periodically for priority customer meetings, and collaborate with a team spread between the West Coast and London.

Work arrangement
Yes