About Nightfall:
Nightfall is the AI-native, unified data loss prevention and insider risk management platform that protects sensitive data across SaaS apps, GenAI tools, email, endpoint devices, and more. Hundreds of customers, spanning AI innovators to top 10 banks, trust Nightfall to detect and stop data exfiltration at scale. Nightfall enables organizations to innovate freely without the risks of losing intellectual property or exposing customer data. Our agentic platform helps security teams regain their time by putting data loss prevention on autopilot. With automatic remediation, security violations can be resolved automatically before they become incidents, and end-users can be automatically trained and coached in the moment to self-heal violations that they introduce.
Nightfall is backed by leading VC firms including Bain Capital Ventures (Enrique Salem - former CEO of Symantec), Venrock (early investors in Cloudflare), WestBridge Capital, Pear VC (early investors in Dropbox and Doordash), and a cadre of cybersecurity leaders including Frederic Kerrest (founder of Okta), Maynard Webb (former COO of eBay), Ryan Carlson (President of Chainguard), Kevin Mandia (founder of Mandiant), and many others.
About the role:
We're hiring our founding Director of Business Development to build Nightfall's sales development function from the ground up. You'll design the outbound and inbound motion, hire and lead the SDR team, and define the metrics that tell us whether it's working.
You'll sit between marketing and sales. You'll work with marketing to turn campaigns and inbound interest into meetings, and with our Enterprise and Commercial AEs to put qualified meetings on their calendars that turn into real pipeline.
This is a builder role. There's no playbook to inherit: you'll set the team structure, hiring plan, qualification standards and operating rhythm, and you'll be hands-on while the team gets off the ground.
- Team: Sales
- Reports to: Chief Revenue Officer
- Location: United States (remote)
- Travel: [ADD: travel %]
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Build the SDR team. Design the team structure, write the hiring plan, and recruit, onboard and ramp Nightfall's first SDRs.
- Design the outbound motion. Define target accounts and personas with sales leadership, build account tiering, sequences and multi-channel plays, and set the weekly operating rhythm.
- Own inbound follow-up. Set speed-to-lead and routing standards with marketing so every hand-raiser gets a fast, relevant response and the right ones become meetings.
- Define what success looks like. Set the metrics for the function, from activity and meetings held to qualified opportunities, pipeline and conversion, and report on them to sales leadership.
- Set qualification and handoff standards. Agree with AEs on what a qualified meeting is, how it's handed off, and how its quality is scored, so meetings turn into opportunities.
- Partner with marketing. Work with growth and field marketing on campaign follow-up, messaging, lead scoring and event outreach, and feed what you hear from the market back into campaigns.
- Partner with the field. Align SDRs to Enterprise and Commercial AEs and to our channel partners, and work target accounts together.
- Coach and develop. Run call reviews, messaging feedback and 1:1s, and build a career path from SDR to AE.
- Build the operating foundation. Own SDR tooling, data and reporting in Salesforce and our sequencing tools, working with RevOps, and propose the SDR comp plan.
- Work AI-forward. Use tools like Claude to speed up account research, personalization, list building and reporting, and teach the team to do the same.
WHAT YOU'LL BRING
- You've built an SDR or BDR team from the ground up, or led one through a major rebuild, at a B2B SaaS startup.
- Several years leading SDR or BDR teams, including hiring, ramping and coaching reps, and promoting them into AE roles.
- Experience selling into security or IT buyers, ideally CISOs and security teams…