Account Executive, State & Local Government
Sales · Remote (US)
You've sold into city hall. You know that the person who decides isn't always the person who signs, that “we have budget next fiscal year” means something specific, and that a Chief Building Official who trusts you is worth more than any RFP scoring matrix. You want to sell something that department actually wants to buy.
Ichi is AI for building code compliance and plan review. Jurisdictions, third-party plan review firms, and architecture firms use us to turn plan review from a bottleneck into a throughput advantage. We're early, we're winning, and we need a first seller who can carry a bag and build the motion at the same time.
Apply by email →What you'll do
- Own your number. This is an individual contributor role. You'll carry a quota, run your own pipeline, and close your own deals — from first conversation with a building official to executed contract.
- Sell into community development. Building departments, planning, permitting, engineering. You'll navigate the department, the city manager's office, IT, procurement, and council when it comes to that.
- Run the full range of deal sizes. Some deals are $25K and close in a quarter. Some are seven figures, span a multi-year enterprise agreement, and involve a competitive procurement, a pilot, and three rounds of security review. You'll be comfortable running both at once.
- Work the procurement paths. Sole source, cooperative purchasing agreements, RFP/RFQ, piggyback contracts, pilot-to-production. You'll know which path is fastest for a given city and drive it.
- Build the playbook. You're early enough that what you learn becomes how we sell. Territory design, pricing tests, objection handling, the deck — you'll shape all of it alongside the CEO.
- Be a credible voice in the industry. ICC chapter meetings, APA and AIA events, state building official associations. Our best pipeline comes from being genuinely known in this community.
- Bring the field back to the product. You'll be closest to why deals stall. Product and engineering will listen to you.
What we're looking for
- A track record selling into local government — cities, counties, special districts. Not just “public sector,” and not just federal or state. Municipal.
- Community development fluency. You understand what a plan examiner does, why a resubmittal cycle matters, how permit fees fund the department, and what a Chief Building Official is actually accountable for. You can hold that conversation without a sales engineer in the room.
- Proven quota attainment as an IC, with real closed-won deals you can walk us through — including at least one large, complex, multi-stakeholder sale.
- Command of long, non-linear sales cycles. Budget calendars, council agendas, staff turnover, and pilots that go quiet for six weeks are the job, not the exception.
- Genuine curiosity about AI — you use it, you can demo it, and you can explain to a skeptical building official what it does and, just as importantly, what it doesn't.
- Comfort with ambiguity and a small team. No SDR handing you meetings, no marketing engine yet. You'll build a lot of this yourself.
- US-based; willing to travel to customers, conferences, and periodically to work with the team in the SF Bay Area.
Nice to have: experience at a permitting, plan review, GIS, ERP, or civic-tech vendor; time spent working inside a jurisdiction; an existing network of building officials and community development directors.
The problems are unusual: construction documents that break every off-the-shelf AI pipeline, codes that change per city block, and an $11T industry (4.3% of US GDP) where faster, more predictable compliance genuinely changes what gets built. The cities you sell to are drowning in review backlogs and can't hire their way out. You'll be selling them the thing that actually fixes it. Cities of tomorrow are built with Ichi.
Apply — connect@ichiplan.com