Sales Development Representative (AI for Scientific Discovery) - FirstPrinciples

About FirstPrinciples

FirstPrinciples is a research company building AI for scientific discovery. It began with Theo, the AI Physicist, and has since grown into a product-focused company with two additional systems including Theo Conjecture, built for automated conjecturing, and Theo Collaborator, an adaptive environment for doing complex research with AI.

We're a fast-growing, remote-first team of builders, researchers, engineers, and thinkers working across Canada, the US, the UK, and expanding globally. What brings us together is a shared curiosity about how the universe works, and a belief that we can build systems that help us explore it more effectively.

We spend our time working on questions that don't have clear answers, like how to design AI that can reason through scientific problems, and how the scientific process as a whole might evolve. This is work that sits somewhere between creativity and rigorous thinking, and often requires comfort with ambiguity and iteration. If you're someone who enjoys tackling big, abstract problems and exploring ideas that don't yet have a defined path forward, you'll likely find the work here interesting.

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

• Rapidly develop fluency in customers’ technical domains, research programs, and scientific problems to identify where FirstPrinciples can create value

• Prepare highly targeted account strategies and outreach based on a genuine understanding of the organization and its work

• Build relationships and pipeline across commercial R&D teams, industry researchers, research groups, national laboratories, and other research-intensive organizations

• Own the end-to-end commercial lifecycle: from prospecting and qualification, to discovery, demos, proposals, and close

• 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

• Partner closely with Research Partners throughout discovery, evaluation, onboarding, and expansion

• Bring market feedback, objections, and emerging use cases back to product, research, and engineering

• Build lightweight systems for outreach, qualification, account planning, CRM management, follow-up, and forecasting that can scale with the organization

• Own clear pipeline, conversion, and revenue goals while helping define our early sales playbook

Who You Are

• Exceptionally curious and analytical, with the ability to rapidly develop fluency in unfamiliar technical and scientific domains

• High agency and learning velocity; you’re comfortable being dropped into a complex topic, figuring it out quickly, and operating without an established playbook

• Able to form strong, testable points of view from incomplete information, grounded in first-principles reasoning rather than defaulting to established frameworks

• You enjoy doing the work before the meeting: reading papers, researching companies, understanding unfamiliar technical problems, and developing a point of view

• Commercially minded and excited by turning complex technology into customer relationships, adoption, and revenue

• Strong communicator who asks sharp questions, listens carefully, leads credible discovery conversations, and can move an opportunity toward a decision

• Able to understand complex research goals and translate technical capabilities into clear, credible value

• Comfortable initiating conversations, prospecting into new organizations, and building relationships from the ground up

• Persistent and highly organized; you follow through, maintain momentum, and are comfortable being accountable for measurable commercial outcomes

• You may come from sales, investing, consulting, banking, data/analytics, a technical startup, scientific commercialization, or another highly analytical environment. Traditional enterprise sales experience is not required

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