Founding Sales Development Representative (SDR)

ABOUT QUALITATE Qualitate is building the AI-native continuous intelligence platform for enterprises, investment firms, and asset managers. We automate the entire primary research workflow, from study design and expert recruitment through AI-moderated interviews and insight synthesis, replacing weeks of manual research with high output signal in hours. Primary research remains slow and transactional for everyone involved. Investment and corporate strategy teams spend hundreds of hours coordinating intermediaries, scheduling calls, and synthesizing fragmented insights. Experts face repetitive outreach, screener calls, schedule wrangling, and one-off engagements that offer them little control or lasting value. Qualitate transforms this experience with an AI-native expert network platform that gives participants the flexibility to contribute on their own time while enabling research at unprecedented scale. Qualitate’s AI Moderator conducts thousands of conversations with experts each month, capturing forward-looking purchasing plans, competitive displacement, and real-time ROI signals. Our continuous intelligence platform then turns these conversations into quantified, time-series outputs tracking over 10,000 public and private companies, queryable instantly in natural language. Our customers include some of the world's largest enterprises, hedge funds, PE firms, credit investors, and venture capital firms. We’re growing fast, and need SDRs to help scale our GTM organization. THE ROLE As the founding SDR at Qualitate, you’ll occupy one of the highest leverage seats on our go-to-market team. You’ll build the top of the funnel for a hyper-growth AI company disrupting a $100B+ market research industry. Our customers and target market include the world’s top enterprises, hedge funds, and private equity firms. You’ll work alongside our sales team and leadership team to help us expand that customer base by generating the pipeline that will define Qualitate’s next stage of growth. We’re hiring for trajectory, not just output. Our best SDRs will earn their own quota, and they’ll help write the playbook every SDR after them runs. We run an AI-native GTM stack, and you’ll become fluent in modern AI sales tools. If you want to learn how a category-defining company gets built from inside the sales engine, this is the seat. WHAT THE DAY-TO-DAY LOOKS LIKE - Build outbound pipeline. Research target accounts and run multi-channel outreach (email, phone, LinkedIn, events) to analysts, PMs, deal teams, and heads of strategy and competitive intelligence. - Book qualified meetings. You’ll own qualified meetings set and pipeline created, and you’re measured on meetings that convert, not activity counts. - Learn the buyer. Understand how a hedge fund analyst, a PE associate, and a corporate strategy lead each use Qualitate’s research platform, and tailor your outreach to each. - Work inbound fast. Respond to and qualify inbound leads within hours, and route strong opportunities to the right AE by segment. - Use AI to get leverage. Build and refine account research, personalization, and sequencing workflows with modern tooling (Clay, Apollo, HubSpot, LLMs). Share what works so the whole team gets faster. - Help build the playbook. As part of the founding GTM team, you’ll help define messaging, qualification criteria, and SDR-to-AE handoff for each segment. WHO THIS ROLE IS FOR - Competitive drive & intellectual curiosity. Sales experience is optional. We care about two things: relentless competitive drive, and the intellectual horsepower to hold a real conversation with a hedge fund PM or a head of corporate strategy. You’ve proven both at the top of something hard: a top-ranked SDR team, an analyst seat at a bank or fund, top performance in athletics or the arts, or entrepreneurial experience. - Measurable results. You can tell us what you were measured on, how you performed, and where you ranked. - Self-starter. You don’t wait around for opportunities - you create them yourself. - Strong communication skills. You can speak and write with professionalism, brevity, and specificity. - AI fluency. You already use AI tools to work faster, or are eager to do so. - Hungry for the AE seat. You want to get promoted to a full-cycle seller and are willing to put in the work to earn it. WHAT SETS YOU APART - Experience at an early-stage startup where the sales process was still being built. - Prior exposure to expert networks, market intelligence, financial data, or research products (GLG, AlphaSense, Tegus, Third Bridge, PitchBook, etc.). - Background selling to or working inside hedge funds, PE, credit, or corporate strategy teams. - Evidence of work outside your job description: tools built, playbooks written, teammates helped. - Top percentile in something demanding: academics, athletics, competitions, a job with a leaderboard. Anything that proves you operate at a high level. COMPENSATION & BENEFITS - OTE: $100K–$130K (base + uncapped commission on qualified pipeline and closed revenue). - Career path: Work directly alongside our CEO and leadership team, sitting in on live deals with the world’s top investment firms and enterprises. Perform, and you move into a closing AE seat with your own quota. - Equity: Meaningful early-stage grant with upside tied to company growth. - Benefits: Health coverage, flexible PTO, paid holidays. - Location: NYC hybrid (3 days in-office, 2 days remote). WHAT TO EXPECT WORKING AT QUALITATE - Excellence. You'll be held accountable to an exceptionally high bar for quality and impact. - High velocity. Fast-paced work environment in terms of growth, decision making, and time to impact. - High agency. Ownership over how you work, not just what you work on. We hire people we trust to figure it out. - Shared ambition. A small, early team disrupting the multi-billion dollar market research industry with AI. - Joy. We work hard and genuinely enjoy working with each other. Dedication to our work is matched only by our passion for fostering an enjoyable, collaborative work environment.