Manager, Sales Development

About Us:

Fireworks is the platform for specialized intelligence, enabling companies to build, train, and serve AI models tailored to their own data, workflows, and products. Founded by the team behind PyTorch and backed by AMD, Atreides, Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures, Lightspeed, NVIDIA, Sequoia Capital, and TCV, Fireworks powers production AI with hundreds of state-of-the-art open models across text, image, embedding, audio, and multimodal workloads. Today, Fireworks is a Series D company valued at $17.5 billion, bringing together an ambitious, collaborative team that's building the future of enterprise AI.

About the role

We’re looking for a Manager, Sales Development to build, coach, and scale a high-performing SDR team. This person will own the day-to-day execution of outbound and inbound pipeline generation, develop repeatable prospecting playbooks, and partner closely with Sales, Marketing, RevOps, and GTM leadership to accelerate revenue growth.

This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who can both set strategy and inspect the details. You’ll be expected to raise the bar on activity quality, messaging, qualification rigor, and conversion, while creating an environment where SDRs learn quickly and grow into future sales leaders.

What you’ll do

• Lead, coach, and develop a team of Sales Development Representatives focused on creating qualified pipeline for Fireworks AI.

• Own SDR team performance against pipeline, meeting, conversion, and activity-quality goals.

• Build and refine outbound prospecting motions across AI-native, enterprise, and strategic accounts.

• Partner with Account Executives and sales leaders to align on target accounts, territories, qualification standards, and follow-up expectations.

• Work closely with Marketing and RevOps to optimize inbound routing, campaign follow-up, sequencing, reporting, and funnel conversion.

• Develop messaging, call coaching, objection handling, and discovery frameworks that help SDRs engage technical and business buyers.

• Establish clear operating rhythms, including pipeline reviews, call reviews, coaching sessions, team meetings, and performance inspection.

• Use data to identify bottlenecks, improve conversion rates, and prioritize the highest-impact accounts and activities.

• Hire, onboard, and ramp new SDRs as the team scales.

• Create a culture of accountability, curiosity, resilience, and continuous improvement.

What we’re looking for

• 3+ years of experience in sales development, business development, or outbound sales, with experience managing or formally coaching SDRs/BDRs.

• Proven ability to build pipeline through high-quality outbound prospecting in a technical, infrastructure, SaaS, AI, or developer-oriented market.

• Strong coaching skills, especially around cold calling, email personalization, account research, qualification, and executive communication.

• Comfort operating in an early-stage or high-growth environment where playbooks are still being built.

• Strong analytical orientation and ability to use funnel metrics to diagnose performance and improve team execution.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

• High standards for talent, process, and operational rigor.

• Ability to partner cross-functionally with Sales, Marketing, RevOps, Product, and Recruiting.

• Interest in AI infrastructure and willingness to learn the technical details of Fireworks’ platform and customer use cases.

Nice to have

• Experience selling or prospecting into technical buyers, engineering leaders, product leaders, founders, or AI/ML teams.

• Experience supporting enterprise, AI-native, developer-tooling, data infrastructure, cloud, or open-source GTM motions.

• Prior experience building an SDR team or outbound motion from an early stage.

• Familiarity with tools such as Salesforce, Outreach/Salesloft, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Gong, Clay, Apollo, or similar prospecting and revenue platforms.

What success looks like

• SDRs consistently create qualified pipeline aligned to Fireworks’ priority segments and accounts.

• The team operates with clear goals, strong coaching rhythms, and high-quality execution.

• Outbound messaging and targeting improve over time based on data, customer feedback, and AE collaboration.

• New SDRs ramp quickly and understand both the technical context and commercial value of Fireworks AI.

• The SDR function becomes a reliable source of future AE talent and scalable pipeline generation.

Location

San Mateo, CA / New York, NY / Remote, depending on team needs and candidate profile.

Why Fireworks?

• Solve Hard Problems: Tackle challenges at the forefront of AI infrastructure, from low-latency inference to scalable model serving.

• Build What’s Next: Work with bleeding-edge technology that impacts how businesses and developers harness AI globally.

• Ownership & Impact: Join a fast-growing, passionate team where your work directly shapes the future of AI—no bureaucracy, just results.

• Learn from the Best: Collaborate with world-class engineers and AI researchers who thrive on curiosity and innovation.

Fireworks AI is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all innovators.