Role
Hive Robotics is building Europe’s first full-stack orchestration platform for unmanned systems: connecting, controlling, and commanding multi-vendor drone and robot swarms. Our RF communication systems are Made in Germany, deployed on active frontlines, and targeting a highly valued tactical communication market with zero sovereign alternatives today.
As our first dedicated Account Executive, you own the sales pipeline: every opportunity from a lead to a signed contract. You take over our existing customer accounts and drive the opportunities our founders and Business Development have opened, with the first new deals expected to close within 3 months. You currently report to the CEO.
This role is customer-facing by design: expect 30–50% travel to customer sites, procurement offices, partners and trade fairs across Germany and Europe, sometimes internationally. The rest of the time you work alongside Engineering, Product Management and our Field Application Engineers.
Responsibilities
- Own the funnel from the first qualified conversation to signature. Our founders and Business Development open doors with customers, partners and the wider ecosystem. From there the opportunity is yours: you qualify it, drive it and close it, pulling the founders back in only when a deal needs them. Leads you generate yourself count just as much, this isn't exclusively BD's territory.
- Qualify hard and early. Run discovery against a fixed gate (pain, budget, decision-making unit, timing) before we invest engineering time in a technical deep dive, and keep a clear next step with a date on every opportunity.
- Lead the customer's buying team through a hardware buying cycle: end users, engineers, procurement, legal and IT, across long evaluations, equipment trials run as projects, integration questions and security reviews.
- Orchestrate the deal team. Bring in our engineers and Field Application Engineers for demos, trials and technical deep dives, and Product Management for configuration and fit. You decide when a deal needs them and what they're there to do.
- Own our active customers commercially: account plans, follow-on orders, upsells and expansion into new units and use cases, every escalation that touches the relationship, and regular account reviews with the Field Application Engineer who owns adoption.
- Turn deployed systems into the next deal: reference visits, customer quotes and case material that you or the founders can use to open new accounts.
- Own the offer: configuration and pricing, terms and conditions, the cost-benefit case on the customer's own data, and the project plan to signature. Lead our responses to RFPs and tenders where they apply, and build the templates so every proposal starts from a proven base.
- Get a trial agreement signed before any trial starts: scope, duration, success criteria, pilot price and the path to the main contract. You drive it, Operations owns the paperwork.
- Close, and hand over cleanly. Request the contract from Operations, keep the customer and the internal side moving, and sign. Then hand over to Operations as a confirmed customer order and to the Field Application Engineer for onboarding.
- Keep the pipeline honest: stage discipline, forecast and CRM hygiene, and a weekly pipeline review you run for the founders
Requirements
Must Have
- 7+ years in B2B sales of technical products into complex, multi-stakeholder deals, ideally in a scale up company
- You have sold hardware, or hardware combined with software and firmware: physical systems with configurations, lead times, integration work and delivery commitments behind them
- Comfortable selling to technical and non-technical stakeholders in the same room, and knowing when to bring in the engineers
- Hands-on daily work in a CRM and a disciplined qualification method (e.g. MEDDPICC): your forecast is something the company can plan on
- Closer's mindset: you treat an opportunity without a next step and a date as a problem, not a pipeline entry
- Structured working style: your offers, decisions and customer commitments are written down so that Operations, the field team and the founders can act on them without asking
- Willingness to travel 30–50 % across Germany and Europe, occasionally beyond Europe
- Fluent English (German is a very big plus)
- Eligibility and willingness to undergo security vetting for access to some customer sites
Nice to Have
- An existing network or experience selling to the DACH defense ecosystem: armed forces, procurement offices, primes, integrators
- Technical fluency in RF communication, embedded systems, unmanned systems, command-and-control or robotics
- Experience building a sales pipeline or sales function from scratch rather than inheriting one
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