Founding Sales Director - AI Training Data & Private Data Licensing

Cookiy AI is building the AI-native Scale AI.

ABOUT US

We are a US-incorporated data company, backed by top-tier venture investors, with $7M+ raised to date.

We did not start here. We started as an AI user research platform: an AI interviewer that runs real, unscripted conversations with real people at scale, sold to enterprise research teams. That business is live, generating revenue, and it handed us three assets that almost nobody else in the AI data market has.

A network of 170M+ everyday people worldwide. Not a rented crowd, not a panel we broker. Our own reach, across dozens of countries and languages.

A production AI interviewer. The same technology that qualifies research participants is a ready-made instrument for eliciting chain-of-thought, screening expert contributors, and collecting structured human reasoning. Only three companies in this entire market screen data contributors with an AI interviewer. We are one of them.

Enterprise-grade compliance. Consent, provenance, deletion rights, and a US legal entity. Our advisors believe our compliance posture is the strongest of any startup in this category. It is the reason enterprise buyers can actually sign with us.

WHAT WE SELL

We are turning that supply into the three things frontier labs actually pay for.

ONE. DATA LABELING AND HUMAN FEEDBACK. RLHF, preference pairs, red-teaming, expert evaluation, agent-trace annotation, with a focus on robotics and embodied AI. The work micro1, Surge, Mercor, Handshake and Luel sell today, delivered from our own network instead of a rented crowd.

TWO. CONSUMER PRIVATE DATA. Real people licensing their own behavioral, conversational and first-person data, with consent and revenue share. Verb, Neon, Caden and Vana proved the willingness exists. Nobody has done it with a compliant US entity and a 170M-person top of funnel.

THREE. ENTERPRISE PRIVATE DATA. SOPs, knowledge bases, CRM histories, engineering workflows and agent traces, acquired, de-identified and licensed. micro1's Data Partnership Program, Ooak Data, Protege and Magma are building this. We intend to win it.

WHY NOW

Meta's $14.3B move on Scale AI pushed billions of dollars of frontier-lab spend toward neutral suppliers, and it has not settled. That window is open right now, and it will not stay open.

THE ROLE

This is the first US commercial hire for our data business. You will not inherit a pipeline. You build the demand side from zero: find the buyers, learn what they actually need, price it, close it, and tell us which of the three lines to double down on.

You report to the CEO and partner with our Global AI Data Sales Lead, who runs the Asia side. You will have direct access to our investors and advisors, several of whom are operators inside this exact market. We move fast, and we have deliberately kept this seat open for someone who wants to define it rather than fill it.

WHO WE ARE LOOKING FOR

We are specifically recruiting sellers from inside the human-data industry. If you carry, or have carried, a number at one of the companies below, we want to talk.

TIER 1: Scale AI, Surge AI, Mercor, Handshake AI

GROWTH: micro1, Turing, Prolific, Invisible Technologies, AfterQuery, Applied Compute, Pareto AI

SERIES A: Datacurve, Fleet AI, Bespoke Labs, Protege, Mechanize, Gray Swan AI, Chakra Labs, Veris AI, Matrices, Huzzle Labs, XDOF, Vals AI, Sapien

ENTERPRISE AND PRIVATE DATA: Ooak Data, Magma, Defined.ai, Bright Data, Datavault AI, Human Native AI, Troveo, TollBit, ProRata.ai, Trainspot, Wirestock, Crosshatch

CONSUMER DATA: Luel, Verb, Vana, Neon Mobile, Caden, Perle, Claru, PublicAI, Grass, Sahara AI, OpenLedger, Codatta, Fraction AI, Reppo, OORT DataHub

EXPERT AND REASONING DATA: Sciloop, Markov, Aviro, Collinear, Andon Labs, BenchFlow, CoArena, Halluminate

RL ENVIRONMENTS: Plato, Proximal, Vmax, HUD, Refresh, Cartpole, Andromede

ROBOTICS AND EGOCENTRIC: Figure, Vision Lab, Cortex AI, Sureform, Praxis Robotics, Human Archive, Build AI, Egolab.AI, Datoric, Pronto, Shift, Sunain, Waffle Video, Atlas Capture, EgoScale, PrismaX, BitRobot

VOICE AND MULTIMODAL: Liva AI, Besimple AI, Pila8, Babel Audio, Silencio, Uplift AI, Shofo, Sieve

PANELS AND CROWD TURNED AI-DATA: CloudResearch, Respondent.io, User Interviews, Askable Labs, Applause, Global App Testing, Toloka, Mindrift, Appen, TELUS Digital, LXT, Centific, Sama, CloudFactory, iMerit, Shaip, Macgence, Indika AI, Uber AI Solutions, DoorDash, Instawork

If your company is in this world and not on this list, still apply. The list is our map, not a filter.

WHAT MATTERS MOST

Direct, warm relationships with the people who own data budgets at frontier labs and robotics companies. This is the single most important requirement. We need a seller with an existing line into the buy side, not someone who will build one from cold email.

A track record closing six- and seven-figure data or annotation contracts.

You are based in San Francisco. The role is remote in title, but the labs are here and so should you be.

Comfort selling three products that are still being shaped, and an opinion about which one wins.

WHAT WE OFFER

Competitive base plus uncapped commission plus meaningful founding equity. A funded company with revenue already coming in from the research business, so the data line is not betting the company. A CEO and investor group who answer quickly and decide quickly: first conversation to offer in under two weeks.