Director Strategic Account Expansion

Giant Swarm is a highly valued and respected player in the cloud-native space. By covering technology, operations, and evolution of cloud-native infrastructure around Kubernetes, companies like adidas, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, and Shutterstock can move faster on their DevOps journey and accelerate their business growth through rapid software innovation. By offering a high-end service, customers are extremely happy and use us across more and more projects within their companies, fuelling our organic growth.

While we already experienced strong customer growth with several large customers, we believe there is a lot more we can do. We are looking for an experienced and technology-savvy sales director, who knows how to leverage existing customer contacts, approach new teams, demonstrate value to senior executives, and can navigate through the political power-play within large corporations. 

• Your main responsibility will be to expand our footprint within existing customer accounts. Our customers are very happy with us and we invest heavily in building a thriving relationship with them through close collaboration, fun events, knowledge sharing, etc. 
• You own the renewal and expansion negotiations with procurement and close contracts with longer and higher commitments from the customer.  
• You actively collaborate with our Account Engineering Team and guide them along strategic growth and measuring success.
• You liaise with business stakeholders to understand their priorities and help internal teams to understand customer priorities and impact. 
• You actively share your knowledge, experiences, and learnings with the product and account engineering teams so we constantly evolve to provide higher customer value.
• You extensively use Hubspot to share contacts, discussions and insights, background information, and next steps with the whole company.

• You have successfully grown customers into large accounts for the last 5+ years. 
• You are highly experienced in selling highly complex tech products and services, and navigating challenging sales processes with multi-year and multi-million commitments.
• You are excellent at building long-term relationships through mutual trust and credibility. 
• You’re willing to dive deep into technology and how we can turn this into customer value.
• You are excellent at identifying customer value, measuring it, and communicating it to senior stakeholders.
• You’re experienced in working remotely and self-organization is a no-brainer.
• We mainly target Central Europe and although our customer base is not limited to this area, your native German skills will be important. 

Why you will like working with us:

• Our customers are extremely happy with us and would recommend us anytime. They join our monthly virtual customer evenings where everyone comes together and shares their knowledge and experiences - and people often stay until after midnight. 
• Together with our customers, we are on a journey of constant growth. You will make a difference to how fast, successfully, and sustainably we grow.
• We are a fully remote company and you are fully integrated - no matter where you live. 
• A startup attitude but profitable since 2017 and predominantly owned by founders and employees - so we control our own destiny.
• We value when things get done and not how much time you work. “Away From Keyboard” is all we need to know.
• Our onsites twice a year are legendary. 
• Fully transparent and no hierarchies - we share all numbers, all decisions and encourage participation on every level.
• We love to learn - the more experience you have the better.

How working with Giant Swarm is like: 

 Every new team member changes the team. We love to learn from each other and we are looking for people who know things we don’t. 

• Becoming part of Giant Swarm means that, by extension, you also become part of the Cloud Native community. We actively contribute to upstream projects and our quarterly hackathons will give you space to work on out-of-the-box projects. Occasionally, when we, as a team, want to fully focus on one project, we scratch all meetings and routines for a certain time to better focus during our hive-sprints(link to blog article).

• Continuous learning is important to us - we foster this through bi-yearly personal development talks, a budget for training/certifications/coaching as well as regular feedback talks and workshops. Our teams are cross- functional and collaboration is key. 

• Nothing crazy, but useful Basics: We don't count holidays but set a minimum number; You choose your own hard- and software; As a company that has almost, if not more, kids than employees, family-friendliness is crucial to us  and paid parental leave is a no-brainer; We pay monthly perks that cover your costs for working remotely; We meet twice a year as an entire company and (if possible) see conferences as an important place to catch up with team members; We aim to be fully transparent (finance, salaries) unless it hurts people and trust you, based on this to make the best decisions

We failed in exactly describing our way to approach important company elements that can be described with ‘buzzwords’ such as agile mindset, cross-functional teams, self-organization, value of the individual or trust & teamwork. However, we truly care about them, we live them and we constantly iterate on them. Some snippets about how we do this are posted in our blog but by far not all of them. 

Important note: We are not hiring job descriptions. We hire humans. :) We welcome applications from everybody, regardless ethnic or national origin, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation or age.