New Business Account Executive

$200K–$250K target compensation + equity
Harness is building an AI-native commercial insurance brokerage for small businesses.
Commercial insurance is a massive industry that still runs on slow workflows, fragmented systems, and too much manual work. We think AI changes the operating model completely: great salespeople should be able to move dramatically faster, serve far more customers, and spend their time selling instead of doing administrative work.
We’re seed-funded, early, and building the sales team that we believe can eventually become hundreds of producers. This is one of the first hires into that next sales organization.
The Role
This is a high-velocity new-business closing role.
You’ll work with small-business owners who need insurance, often urgently. You’ll understand what they need, move quickly through the quote process with our insurance and technology teams, explain the options clearly, overcome objections, and ask for the business.
Most accounts are intentionally straightforward SMB risks with short sales cycles. We want sellers who enjoy momentum:
Call. Qualify. Quote. Follow up. Close. Next.
You will own a number, know where you stand every day, and be expected to figure out how to win when you’re behind.
You do not need an insurance background.
We will train you in commercial insurance, pay for your licensing and exams, and surround you with experienced insurance people and AI-powered tools that help with qualification, coverage, market selection, applications, and placement.
What we cannot teach nearly as easily is hunger.
What You’ll Own
Own new SMB opportunities from first meaningful conversation through bind.
Sell primarily over the phone in a high-volume environment.
Move quickly. When a customer is ready to buy, treat every unnecessary delay as a problem to solve.
Understand the customer’s business, urgency, current coverage, pricing and decision criteria.
Explain insurance simply. Customers should understand what they are buying without needing to become insurance experts themselves.
Ask directly for the business.
Follow up relentlessly on real opportunities rather than letting good deals quietly die.
Handle objections around price, timing, trust and switching providers.
Work closely with placement and insurance experts when an account requires deeper technical knowledge.
Use AI and automation aggressively to move faster and spend more of your day talking to customers.
Listen to your own calls, study losses, test new approaches and continuously improve your conversion.
Capture why customers bought, waited or walked away so the entire Harness system gets smarter.
Help us build the scripts, processes, tooling and standards that future Harness salespeople will use.
What Success Looks Like
We care much more about outcomes than looking busy.
You’ll be measured on things like:
Policies closed
Revenue generated
Lead-to-bind conversion
Speed to first contact
Quote-to-bind conversion
Follow-up execution
Quality and accuracy of the business you sell
If you’re behind your target, we shouldn’t have to tell you.
You inspect your funnel, call more customers, reopen old opportunities, listen to lost calls, ask for help, change your approach and find a way forward.
That level of ownership is fundamental to this role.
Who Will Thrive Here
You have probably spent the last few years in a fast-moving SMB sales environment and feel like you can do much more. You may be a great AE already, or an exceptional SDR/BDR who knows you are ready to close.
You’ll probably recognize yourself in several of these:
You love selling and genuinely enjoy being on the phone.
You have worked in a high-volume SMB or transactional sales environment.
You move quickly without needing someone to constantly manage you.
Rejection barely changes your energy.
You are competitive and like knowing exactly where you stand.
You have a history of beating targets, getting promoted quickly, or outperforming people with more experience.
You want your earnings to increase materially when your output increases.
You study your own performance instead of explaining away bad results.
You want responsibility earlier in your career than a large company is likely to give you.
You want to help build a sales organization rather than inherit one.
You believe joining the right early-stage company can be a much bigger career outcome than taking another conventional AE seat.
Insurance experience is not required.
Who Probably Won’t Enjoy This Role
This is unlikely to be a fit if:
You want long enterprise sales cycles and a small book of strategic accounts.
You expect an SDR to do all of your prospecting and a manager to keep your pipeline moving.
You dislike high call volumes or direct closing conversations.
You are uncomfortable having your numbers visible.
You want predictable work that rarely changes.
You need extensive process before you can operate.
You prefer account management and relationship maintenance to new-business hunting.
You want to move into management immediately rather than become an exceptional individual producer first.
You view learning insurance, reviewing calls or improving conversion as somebody else’s responsibility.
Commercial Insurance Training & Licensing
You do not need to arrive knowing commercial insurance.
Harness will:
Pay for your commercial insurance licensing and exam costs.
Provide the training required to get licensed.
Give you dedicated insurance and placement support while you ramp.
Provide technology and AI tools that help you understand risks, collect the right information and find the appropriate path for the customer.
We expect you to take the learning seriously and become licensed quickly.
Compensation
The exact base depends on demonstrated sales performance and how independently you can operate from day one.
Target total compensation: $200,000–$250,000+.
Commission is directly tied to new-business production. Exceptional producers should be able to materially outperform target compensation.
Equity: Yes. Early employees will have meaningful ownership in the company.
Benefits: Health and other standard employee benefits.
How We Work
Location: Remote, with a strong preference for people based in or able to regularly reach the San Francisco Bay Area.
San Francisco: The sales team will meet in person approximately once a week to review performance, listen to calls, improve the playbook, solve problems and plan the next week.
Working rhythm: This is an intense, high-output sales role designed around broad SMB customer availability. Expect an early start and substantial availability across roughly 6 AM–6 PM Pacific Time.
This is not a role where management measures commitment by whether your Slack light is green for twelve hours.
We care about production, urgency, customer responsiveness and ownership.
This is an early-stage company with aggressive goals. We are looking for people who actively want that environment.
Why Harness
The immediate job is selling commercial insurance.
The bigger opportunity is helping us answer a much more ambitious question:
What happens when great salespeople, commercial insurance expertise and AI are combined into one operating system?
If we get it right, we believe Harness can become a very large company. The first few people who help us build that sales machine will have substantially more influence, responsibility and upside than someone joining after the playbook already exists.
If that sounds exciting rather than intimidating, we’d like to meet you.

Work arrangement
Yes