Founding Account Executive (Italian Speaker)

About Sona

Frontline work keeps the world running. Restaurants, hospitals, schools, nurseries, airlines, stores, emergency services. Together they employ 80% of the global workforce, over 3 billion people, and they're among the hardest businesses anywhere to run. By-the-minute scheduling, HR and payroll make them far more operationally complex than the average office, yet just 1% of venture funding has ever gone to software built for them.

Rising costs, wage increases, labour shortages and tighter regulation have made fixing that urgent. Sona is the AI-native workforce management platform for frontline organisations, with agents that match staffing to real demand and take the admin load off managers. That's a $500bn+ market the software industry has mostly walked past.

We've raised over $100M from N47, Felicis, Gradient and Northzone, signed more than 100 enterprise customers across the UK and US, and opened offices in London, New York, Austin and Lisbon. More on working at Sona here ( https://www.sona.ai/careers ).

About the Role

We're hiring a Founding Account Executive to win Sona's first customers in Italy and open the market for us. This is a senior, seller-first role, and you'll run every conversation with prospects in Italian, from the first call to the close.

Our expansion into Europe is starting now and ramps up through 2027 across key markets. Italy is one of them, and you'll own the go-to-market launch there. Colleagues across Sona will be running the product, operations and other launch activities, so your focus is winning customers, building partnerships and creating the collateral to sell. With no sales team in market yet, you'll work with less support than a typical AE, and the team around you will grow as the market does.

Day to day, you'll decide which Retail and Hospitality accounts to go after, from mid-market through to enterprise, and run consultative sales conversations yourself. You'll also build what a new market needs, including partnerships and Italian-language collateral. The platform is already localised for Italy, and you'll have product and solutions support.

It's early, and the ground will shift as we learn what works. If you want a structured environment with lots of support around you, this won't be the right fit. If you want to shape how Sona sells in Italy from the start, it could be exactly that. The role is office-based in London, with travel to Italy as needed.

Responsibilities

- Lead the go-to-market launch in Italy and win Sona's first customers, taking each deal from first conversation to close.
- Build your own pipeline across Retail and Hospitality, from mid-market to enterprise.
- Run strategic, consultative sales conversations in Italian.
- Build and run partnerships that open doors in the Italian market.
- Create the collateral Sona needs to sell in Italy.
- Work with Sona's Strategy and Expansion Lead on where to focus and how to approach the market.
- Feed what you learn from the market back to our Commercial and Product teams.
- Travel to Italy as the role requires.

Requirements

- You're a native Italian speaker, comfortable selling and negotiating in Italian, with fluent English for working with colleagues in London.
- You have a senior Account Executive track record of winning new business, ideally across mid-market and enterprise deals.
- You have a founder mentality. You take ownership, make decisions with limited information, and are happy building without a playbook.
- You're strategic and consultative in how you sell, and you work well independently with less support than most AEs get.
- You're comfortable creating partnerships and collateral from scratch.
- You're based in London, or able to be, and happy to travel to Italy as the role needs.
- Strongly preferred: Spanish, French or German as an additional language. It doesn't replace Italian.

Benefits

- Salary: £80,000 - £120,000 base depending on experience, with OTE of £160,000 - £240,000
- Office-based in our London office, with travel to Italy as the role requires
- Share options
- 35 days annual leave (25 days standard plus 10 flexible public holiday days)
- Extra day of leave for every year of service
- Pension contributions matched up to 5%
- Comprehensive health insurance
- Enhanced parental leave & pay
- Salary sacrifice childcare scheme (Workplace Nursery)
- Annual all expenses paid team retreats
- The latest Macbook and equipment budget for your home office
- Professional development budget
- Unlimited free books

Note: this represents a typical benefits package for a UK-based, full-time employee. Exact details may vary based on location and employment type but we try to be as fair as possible to all of our team members. Please ask your contact in the Talent team to clarify the available benefits for you.

Compensation

£80K – £120K • Offers Equity • Offers Commission