Founding Sales Development Representative: Industrial Fire Prevention and Predictive Maintenance

Your mission

Fires and unplanned downtime cost industrial companies millions. We catch both before they happen. 

AVIAN's Swiss-engineered infrared cameras and AI monitoring detect abnormal heat inside industrial facilities at the point of inception. One signal does two jobs: it flags fire risk before a fire starts, and equipment wear before it becomes an unplanned shutdown. 

Our system has already prevented thousands of fire events and saved millions of dollars in downtime prevented in live operations across wood processing, recycling, and paper. We are also driving into new, exciting verticals like data centers and battery storage facilities with our powerful, adaptable solution.

Insurers are partnering with us, and the demand is real. What limits us is reach. Thousands of US facilities carry the exact risk we were built to catch and have never heard our name, and inbound will never get to them.

You are joining our founding sales team in the US, reporting to the SVP of Sales. You are the first voice a prospect hears, and every meeting you book is pipeline our account executives did not have to build themselves.

What you'll own:

• The phones. Most of your day goes into starting conversations with people who did not ask to hear from you: plant managers, maintenance and reliability leaders, safety leaders, operations and executive buyers. You get them talking, you keep them talking, and you book the meeting. Email and LinkedIn support the calls, and you decide who to target and why before you reach out.
• Trade shows. Before every show, you work the attendee list to line up meetings at our booth. After, you follow up with everyone who stopped by while it is still warm. Trade shows are one of our best sources of pipeline.
• Qualification and handoff. You find out quickly whether the pain is serious, whether there is a reason to move now, and whether the person can make it happen. Then you brief the account executive: what hurts, who is involved, why now.
• Doors into sister sites. Many customers run several facilities. Once one plant is happy, you find the right people at the other sites and book the first conversation.
• Your stack. ZoomInfo to find the right companies and contacts, HubSpot to run outreach and keep the pipeline clean, and AI tools like Claude and Artisan to research an account and draft first-pass outreach in seconds. The tools do the grunt work. The judgment and the conversations are yours.
• The playbook. You write down what works and pass it on: the openers that land, the objections you learned to handle, the target lists that keep producing.

The person who picks up the phone is rarely the person who signs, so you map the account and work toward the people who matter. The hook changes with the person, too. Some are terrified of a fire, others are sick of a line that keeps going down.

What success looks like in year one:

• The meetings you book become pipeline, not calendar filler.
• The account executives trust what you hand them, because you qualify honestly instead of padding your numbers.
• You find a repeatable way to get plant managers on the phone and keep them there.
• You document what works, so the SDRs after you ramp faster.

Your profile

Who you are:

• You're a hunter, and you don't quit. You go find leads instead of waiting for them. You hear no all day and dial again, and rejection doesn't stick to you.
• You're sharp on the phone. You can get a busy plant manager to give you two minutes, think on your feet when they push back, and sound like someone worth talking to. The phone is where you do your best work.
• You're naturally curious. You'll be calling people who run industrial operations. You don't need to know their world yet, but you have to want to understand it.
• You're competitive, coachable, and after the next seat. You keep score, you take feedback fast, and SDR is your way in rather than your ceiling. Do this well, and you will not be an SDR here for long.
• You're organized. Clean CRM (we run HubSpot), disciplined follow-up, nothing forgotten.
• You use AI as an edge. You already reach for tools like Claude to move faster, and you know when it helps and when to just pick up the phone.

You might be coming from another SDR or BDR seat, inside sales, a call-heavy account or support role, recruiting, real estate, or hospitality. Anywhere you won people over by talking to them.

Bonus points if you've prospected into our core verticals (wood processing, recycling, paper) or built relationships with plant operators, safety leaders, or facilities teams that open doors.

If you don't tick every box but you know you can get people on the phone and turn cold outreach into pipeline, apply anyway and tell us why.

Why us?

What we offer:

• Compensation: competitive base plus uncapped variable tied to the meetings and pipeline you generate.
• A path up: SDR is the on-ramp, not the destination, and the people who prove themselves here move into closing roles.
• Access: you report to the SVP of Sales and work directly with our leadership team and founders, with a modern stack and the freedom to use it.
• A product that sells into urgency you do not have to manufacture: fires are an existential risk, downtime costs our customers every month, and insurers increasingly require prevention.
• Flexible, high-trust working model with an international, customer-obsessed team.

How we work:
Clarity, ownership, speed. Everyone owns outcomes end-to-end. We fail fast and fix faster. Knowledge is shared, decisions are open, feedback is constant.

Hiring process:

• Intro call (30 min): mutual fit and what drives you.
• Deep-dive interview: how you prospect, where your pipeline has come from, and what you learned from the calls that went badly.
• Live exercise: a cold-call role-play on a real facility scenario (recycling plant or sawmill). We want to hear how you open, handle the brush-off, and book the meeting.
• Meet the team and a conversation with our founders.
• Offer: we move in weeks, not months.

AVIAN is an equal-opportunity employer. We welcome applicants regardless of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, or veteran status. Reasonable accommodations are available upon request.

About us

Early Fire Prevention. Predictive Power.

AVIAN’s Swiss-engineered computer vision algorithms provide mission-critical protection for high-risk industries - wood, recycling, paper, and beyond - by spotting process anomalies before they escalate. Our AI-driven system has already stopped thousands of fires and downtime hours in real operations, saving facilities from catastrophic loss.

With the world’s largest dataset of real fire events, AVIAN delivers unmatched accuracy, instant alerts (SMS, WhatsApp, phone), and PLC-based automatic shutdowns. Beyond fire safety, our predictive maintenance analytics extend equipment lifetime, reduce downtime, and keep your facility insurable.