Account Director, Higher Education

Responsibilities

• Own and execute the AMER higher education territory and account strategy.
• Create pipeline and lead complex, multi-threaded new-business and expansion opportunities through procurement, deployment, adoption, value realization, and expansion.
• Engage presidents, provosts, CIOs, CTOs, academic leaders, researchers, administrators, security teams, legal, procurement, finance, and end-user champions.
• Lead cross-functional pursuit and account teams across Solutions Engineering, Customer Success, Product, Research, Security, and Legal.
• Design evaluations, pilots, technical validation, executive business cases, production deployments, and adoption plans.
• Translate AI capabilities and limitations, integration approaches, governance requirements, privacy, security, and safety considerations into institutional value and transformation roadmaps.
• Own new-business, subscription, and consumption revenue; forecast pipeline and usage-based growth.
• Develop executive relationships and institutional champion coalitions.
• Bring higher education market insight into product, policy, partnership, and go-to-market strategy.
• Represent the company at executive forums, industry events, customer advisory discussions, and within the higher education ecosystem.

Requirements

• 10+ years selling platform-as-a-service and/or software-as-a-service solutions, with a record of meeting or exceeding meaningful revenue targets through complex, multi-year enterprise sales motions.
• Direct experience selling to higher education institutions or systems.
• Understanding of decentralized decision-making, academic and administrative stakeholders, governance, procurement, privacy, security, and change management.
• Experience owning consumption- or usage-based revenue, forecasting usage, driving adoption, creating use cases, and converting outcomes into expansion.
• Technical depth to learn complex AI products, lead discovery, partner with technical teams, and explain technical concepts to executive and practitioner audiences.
• Experience leading strategic transformations involving governance, change management, adoption, and measurable outcomes.
• Strong executive presence, structured communication, and ability to build trust across senior leaders, technical experts, faculty, administrators, and end users.
• Account planning, qualification, negotiation, forecasting, and cross-functional orchestration skills.
• High judgment, curiosity, resilience, and comfort with ambiguity, product change, and evolving customer needs.
• Mission-driven approach to responsible AI deployment.

Nice-to-Haves

• Ability to move between institutional strategy discussions and working sessions on architecture, data, governance, rollout, and measurement.
• Experience creating repeatable sales and transformation plays while adapting to each institution’s operating model.
• Ability to balance optimism about AI with rigor around risks, tradeoffs, and implementation realities.