Account Director, Higher Education

Quick Facts

• Role: Account Director for Higher Education (AMER)
• Focus: Own strategic higher education relationships and drive responsible, institution-wide AI transformation

Description

Own end-to-end commercial and customer journey outcomes for higher education accounts as they move from AI experimentation to responsible, scalable transformation. Lead complex enterprise sales motions—territory strategy, pipeline creation, evaluation, procurement, deployment, adoption, consumption, and expansion—while translating AI capabilities and constraints into institutional value and multi-year roadmaps. Partner across technical and functional teams to design evaluations, production deployments, and adoption plans with measurable customer and revenue outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Own and execute AMER higher education territory and account strategy
• Create pipeline and lead complex new-business and expansion opportunities through deployment, adoption, and value realization
• Engage credibly with presidents, provosts, CIOs, CTOs, academic leaders, researchers, administrators, security, legal, procurement, and finance
• Lead cross-functional pursuit/account teams to design evaluations, pilots, technical validation, executive business cases, deployments, and adoption plans
• Translate AI platform/model capabilities and limitations into governance, privacy, security, and safety-aware transformation roadmaps
• Own new-business, subscription, and consumption revenue; forecast and drive usage-based growth
• Build durable executive relationships and a coalition of institutional champions
• Bring market insight into product, policy, partnership, and go-to-market strategy
• Represent the company at executive forums and industry events across the higher education ecosystem

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience selling platform-as-a-service and/or software-as-a-service solutions with a sustained record of meeting/exceeding revenue targets
• Direct experience selling to higher education institutions or systems; understanding of decentralized decision-making and governance/procurement/privacy/security/change management
• Demonstrated ownership of consumption/usage-based revenue, including forecasting usage, driving adoption, creating use cases, and enabling expansion
• Technical depth to learn complex AI products, lead discovery, explain technical concepts, and translate them into academic/operational/research/commercial outcomes
• Experience leading strategic transformations beyond point solutions, including governance, change management, adoption, and measurable outcomes
• Strong executive presence, structured communication, and ability to earn trust across senior leaders, technical experts, faculty, administrators, and end users
• Excellent account planning, qualification, negotiation, forecasting, and cross-functional orchestration skills
• High judgment, curiosity, resilience, and comfort operating through ambiguity and evolving customer needs
• Mission-driven approach to responsible AI deployment and durable capability building

Benefits

This role emphasizes measurable customer and revenue outcomes, multi-year institutional transformation, and responsibility for adoption, usage growth, value realization, and expansion.