Sales & Commercial Lead (AI for Scientific Discovery)
Job Description
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Why This Role Exists:
We’re building products to accelerate progress in physics - but that only matters if the right researchers discover them, understand how they work, and make the decision to adopt them. Besides building the technology, the challenge is earning the trust of researchers and institutions, and translating it into active usage and commercial relationships.
This role exists to lead that journey. You’ll work across the full sales lifecycle: from identifying and reaching out to researchers and organizations, to discovery, demos, evaluations, and close. You’ll help prospective users move from curiosity, to confidence that the platform can advance their research.
Your impact will directly shape who we serve, how we bring the product to market, and how quickly we build a repeatable path to adoption and revenue.
What You’ll Do:
Help build the commercial function from the ground up, continuously testing and refining our ICP, messaging, sales process, and go-to-market motion based on what you learn in the market
Build relationships and pipeline across commercial R&D teams, industry researchers, research groups, national laboratories, and other personas
Own the end-to-end commercial lifecycle: from prospecting and qualification, to discovery, demos, proposals, and close
Conduct thoughtful, targeted outreach to physicists and research leaders, grounded in an understanding of their work and potential needs
Run technically credible discovery conversations and product demos that connect researchers’ goals to concrete product use cases
Help prospective customers structure pilot plans, establish success criteria, and build confidence in adopting the platform
Navigate multiple stakeholders across scientific, technical, administrative, procurement, and leadership functions
Build lightweight systems for outreach, qualification, account planning, CRM management, follow-up, and forecasting that can scale with the organization
Work closely with Research Partners to create a strong handoff from commercial agreement to onboarding, successful usage, and long-term adoption
Bring market feedback, objections, and emerging use cases back to product, research, and engineering
Own clear pipeline, conversion, and revenue goals while helping define our early sales playbook
Who You Are:
Energized by the ambiguity of an early commercial function - you're as comfortable figuring out how we should sell as you are working through the sale itself
Strong background in physics or a closely related scientific field (A background in physics, or a related scientific field)
Genuinely interested in commercial work and motivated by helping scientific products reach the researchers who can benefit from them
Comfortable initiating conversations, prospecting into new organizations, and building relationships from the ground up
Able to understand complex research goals and translate technical capabilities into clear, credible value
Experience in consultative sales, business development, scientific partnerships, solutions consulting, research commercialization, or a similarly customer-facing role
Strong communicator who can lead discovery conversations, present compelling demonstrations, and move opportunities toward a decision
Persistent and highly organized, you follow through, maintain momentum, and are comfortable being accountable for measurable commercial outcomes
What You’ll Get:
The opportunity to work on foundational problems at the intersection of AI and physics
A high-trust, low-bureaucracy environment with real ownership
Remote-first work with flexibility in how you structure your day
Exposure to cutting-edge ideas across AI, scientific discovery, and emerging technologies
A culture that values curiosity, depth of thinking, and first-principles reasoning
The chance to contribute to work aimed at advancing fundamental science
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FirstPrinciples
View Company ProfileFirstPrinciples is an independent, non-profit research organization established in 2024 by Ildar Shar. Dedicated to understanding the fundamental nature of reality, the organization blends advanced artificial intelligence with fundamental physics to build the "AI Physicist"—an AI system designed to scale the process of scientific discovery. Operating with the agility of a tech startup and the purpose of a non-profit, FirstPrinciples is an "AI-first by design" and remote-first team. They actively collaborate with academic and research institutions worldwide, maintaining open-source tools, datasets, and simulation environments to advance scientific reasoning, symbolic regression, and equation discovery.
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