Strategic Account Director - Financial Services
Sayari · United States
USD 150,000 to 180,000 a year
About Sayari:
Sayari is the judgment infrastructure for trustworthy AI in economic security and commercial risk. The Sayari Commercial World Model resolves 11.7B+ primary-source records from 250+ jurisdictions forming the ground truth of global commerce. A Judgment Ontology, encoding over a decade of investigative tradecraft, and Superconductor, an agentic orchestration platform, deliver AI that reasons like an expert analyst, shows its work, and traces every finding to its source. Trusted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, HM Revenue & Customs, and Fortune 500 enterprises, Sayari is used by thousands of professionals across 35+ countries to secure supply chains and dismantle illicit networks. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., with offices in London, Singapore, Tokyo, and Tel Aviv.
THE OPPORTUNITY
We are taking the innovative and groundbreaking Commercial World Model into its next phase: agentic AI that reasons over it directly, running investigations and surfacing risk the way a senior analyst would, but at a speed and scale no human team can match.
The opportunity is to build a business from the ground up, with the support of an established, tested, and proven global organization. It offers the freedom of being an entrepreneur within a business, alongside extensive and highly talented resources, including your own Forward Deployed Engineer to convert opportunities into real-world commercial value. You would be in the driving seat of a new product initiative in an industry that could hardly be more relevant, with a front-row role in the changes shaping global markets right now.
We are hiring a Strategic Account Director, based in New York, to bring deep subject matter expertise in our financial institutions vertical, joining an already strong sales team to go deeper into the relationships, the domain depth, and the agentic use cases this vertical needs next. You will bring the network and the credibility that only years inside this sector can build and use it to accelerate and grow what we are already doing here.
You won’t be the first rep at Sayari, but you will be one of the first people anywhere selling autonomous investigation and risk agents into this vertical, on a foundation of data other vendors in our space just don’t have. That’s the pitch you’ll be making, and it’s a true one.
This is a senior, relationship-led seat focused on true enterprise outcomes: multiyear agreements of $2M+, expanding agentic AI adoption into every adjacent buying center inside your accounts. Financial institutions run on relationships that take years to earn, and we are hiring people who already have them and can use them to go deeper into a vertical we are already investing in, not to start one from nothing.
This seat owns a high-value U.S. commercial enterprise book with a dual mandate: expand what’s already there, and open new tier-1 logos using a network you already have. It is not a renewal seat, nor a customer-success seat with a senior title bolted on.
WHAT YOU WILL DRIVE
- Own the Full Cycle for Your Accounts: Win new business and drive revenue within financial services, from your first conversation with a target account through a signed multiyear agreement. Self-generate 60%+ of your pipeline through your network, targeted outreach, and practitioner communities, not inbound leads.
- Deepen the Playbook: Bring domain-specific expertise that sharpens how we sell agentic AI into this vertical. Refine the sales methodology, positioning, and use-case narrative based on what you know works with this exact buyer, and share that expertise with the wider team.
- Vertical Expansion: Grow Sayari’s footprint within financial services and the target account tier for this vertical, shifting accounts from a single agentic use case to enterprise-wide deployment across the Commercial World Model and our AI agents.
- Executive and Functional Mapping: Build deep, trusted relationships across every function that touches risk in this vertical, including compliance and legal leadership, risk operations, investigations teams, procurement, and IT. Think Chief Risk Officers, Chief Compliance Officers, BSA/AML Officers, Heads of Supply Chain, and General Counsel inside U.S. financial institutions.
- Prove the Agent, Then Scale It: Strategically partner with Customer Success and Solutions Engineering to get our agentic workflows into production with top-tier customers first, using and promoting early wins as reference points to unlock net-new budget across the account.
- Bring a Dedicated Team to Every Deal: Work alongside forward-deployed engineers and analysts dedicated to your accounts, embedding directly with risk, compliance, supply chain, and AI infrastructure teams to prove out real use cases and make sure what you sell actually gets deployed and adopted, using those wins to unlock net-new budget elsewhere in the account.
- Inform the Roadmap: You are on the front line of how this vertical reacts to autonomous AI. Bring that market intelligence back to Product and Engineering so the roadmap reflects what the sector is demanding now and in the future.
- Commercial Rigor: Maintain a predictable pipeline backed by structured sales methodology such as MEDDPICC, Challenger, or Miller Heimann, and provide leadership with an accurate, reliable forecast they can actually plan against.
WHO YOU ARE
- The Domain Expert: 15+ years immersed specifically within the financial services blue-chip segment, with C-suite level context and a focus on banking compliance, risk, and technology, and with a real, live, and verifiable network already established inside that sector. Not adjacent experience, but genuine subject matter expertise, including deep fluency in the U.S. regulatory environment (for example, BSA/AML, OFAC sanctions compliance, and NYDFS requirements), the operational challenges practitioners face day to day, and the latest trends shaping the sector. You understand the growing importance of this position and are comfortable in senior C-suite conversations on this topic within the U.S. banking community.
- The Enterprise Growth Track Record: A history of closing multimillion-dollar, multiyear agreements and driving significant net-new revenue out of an existing base of complex accounts and new logo accounts, one you can speak to in specific, named detail.
- The Communicator: Executive presence strong enough to explain technical data provenance and AI reasoning to non-technical senior stakeholders, and to be treated as a peer rather than a vendor.
- The Strategist: Expert at navigating complex procurement, legal review, and multithreaded account politics. Someone who can move from a single buyer into two or more adjacent buying centers inside the same organization, fluent in structured sales methodologies such as MEDDPICC, Challenger, or Miller Heimann, and able to apply that discipline to genuinely complex, multi-stakeholder deals.
- The Practitioner’s Peer: Has spent a career inside this vertical, not selling into it from the outside. Should be able to hold a substantive conversation with a senior industry practitioner on the specific regulatory, operational, or risk pressures they face, and be recognized as someone who has done the homework, not someone reciting a vendor pitch.
- The Builder and Pioneer: You bring both pioneering drive and a builder’s instinct: the ability to not only penetrate existing accounts but also drive new market entry and stand up new products in a fast-moving, topical environment, backed by a highly proactive, entrepreneurial, creative, and deeply diagnostic approach to running your own book of business. You’re genuinely energized by growing something rather than just maintaining it, with demonstrated experience building a vertical from scratch, and you’re comfortable bringing that same mindset to sharpening how our enterprise sells into a specific vertical.
- AI-Fluent by Interest or Experience: A real interest in or ex