---
title: 'Account Director at Outset'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/account-director-outset-san-francisco-yarryqq4qat7'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-19'
---

# Account Director at Outset

- **Company:** Outset
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $160k–$185k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-09-22
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-19
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/outset/00c28962-03ed-4b0a-a201-bfcc3d2537f2

## Job description

Outset invented a better way to do research: AI-powered user interviews.

Global brands like Hubspot, Microsoft, Uber and Nestle use Outset to achieve deeper, qualitative insights about their users at unprecedented speed and scale.

The research industry is massive (>$140B and growing) and ripe for disruption. Incumbents are outdated, slow, and burdened by high-cost services. That's our opportunity.

Outset is backed by top Silicon Valley investors and raised a $30M Series B in December 2025—less than six months after our Series A—led by Radical Ventures with participation from M12 (Microsoft’s venture arm), 8VC, Y Combinator, and Adverb Ventures.

The raise follows a breakout year, with our business growing 8x as enterprise customers across industries adopt our category, AI‑moderated research, as the new standard for understanding people.

We’re a tight-knit team serving some of the world’s largest enterprises.

As an Account Director, you’ll own relationships with some of our most strategic enterprise and mid-market customers. You’ll act as a trusted advisor, ensuring they achieve maximum value from our platform while identifying new opportunities for growth and partnership. You’ll collaborate closely with Product, Sales, and Marketing to influence roadmap priorities and expand our footprint within key accounts. Responsibilities:

- Serve as a strategic partner to executive stakeholders, guiding customers through adoption, expansion, and long-term success.
- Own commercial health across a portfolio of high-value accounts, driving renewals, upsells, and advocacy
- Develop account plans and success frameworks that align with customer business objectives.
- Partner with Sales to identify and close revenue expansion opportunities within existing accounts.
- Translate customer feedback into actionable input for Product and Engineering.
- Forecast retention and growth metrics, providing visibility into customer health and pipeline.

## Qualifications

- 5–10+ years of customer success, account management, or consulting experience, with 2+ years managing strategic/enterprise accounts.
- Ability to travel 25% of the time for customer events, customer visits, and conferences.
- Proven success in driving renewals, expansions, and multi-threaded stakeholder relationships.
- Experience in a fast-paced SaaS or Series A/B startup environment.
- Exceptional communication, executive presence, and relationship-building skills.
- Strong analytical mindset with ability to tell a story with data.
- Ability to work cross-functionally and thrive in ambiguity.
- A proactive, ownership-driven mindset—comfortable balancing strategic and hands-on work.

## About Outset

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Outset is an AI-moderated research platform that combines conversational AI, behavioral intelligence, and emotional analysis to let companies run high-quality qualitative interviews and research studies at massive scale.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2022
- **Founders**: Aaron Cannon (CEO) and Michael Hess

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Software Development / AI-Moderated Research & Insights Platform
- **Target customers**: Enterprise research teams (UX/Market/Consumer Insights), large corporations, and product teams (B2B, Enterprise)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: "The future of innovation begins with listening to humans." Understanding people’s needs, motivations, and behaviors is the hardest and most important challenge for businesses; Outset makes that understanding effortless and scalable.

## Products & Services
- **AI-Moderated Interviews**: Conduct hundreds of AI-moderated interviews simultaneously in any language (video, voice, or text). The AI moderator dynamically probes participants based on audio and visual cues to uncover the "why" behind answers.
- **Instant Synthesis & Analysis**: Automatically generates highly relevant summaries, themes, impactful quotes, and customizable highlight reels based on research objectives, eliminating manual tagging and sifting.
- **Participant Recruitment**: Recruit hundreds of participants directly within the platform, or share an interview link with any external list.
- **Guide Set Up**: Effortlessly set up interview guides using AI, with qualitative/quantitative questions, advanced probing guidelines, and intelligent skipping logic.
- **Easy Stakeholder Shareout**: Get instant top-line reports, custom AI-generated reports, highlight reels, and ready-to-share PowerPoint decks to integrate research into decision-making.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Key Metric**: Annual Revenue of USD 8,500,000 (as of latest data). Total Funding of USD 51,250,000.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Lead investors include **Radical Ventures** (Series B), **8VC** (Series A), with participation from 24 investors in earlier rounds. Trusted by enterprises like **Microsoft**, **Nestle**, **Uber**, **Hubspot**, and **Away**.
- **Growth Signals**: Massive headcount growth of **+563.6% year-over-year** (now 54 employees). Customer research coverage from 1.1B+ possible participants across 85+ countries, with over 500K studies run on the platform.

## Competitive Advantages
- Proprietary AI that bridges the "say-do gap" by probing in real-time based on audio and visual cues, not just recall.
- Multi-modal, multi-lingual scaling: enables research in any language, at any timezone, with continuous, multithreaded AI-moderated conversations.
- Enterprise-grade simplicity: designed for large research teams, removing scheduling friction and operations overhead so research happens in days, not months.
- End-to-end platform: from participant recruitment, guide setup, AI-moderation, to instant analysis and stakeholder shareout — a single integrated suite.

## Strategic Focus
- Expand leadership in replacing traditional, slow qualitative research (surveys, live interviews) with instant, scalable AI-moderated studies.
- Deepen enterprise penetration with top-tier clients (Microsoft, Nestle, Uber, HubSpot) by continuing to add advanced behavioral and emotional analysis features.
- Scale the platform’s capabilities to cover the entire research lifecycle more comprehensively, continuing to invest heavily in R&D.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture highlights**: "Supportive founders and seasoned investors foster community, without startup toxicity." Team is described as "smart, kind, and driven teammates who know how to make work fun." Founders are very hands-on and accessible.
- **Remote/hybrid/office policy**: Primarily in-office at a "million-dollar office space" in SF with sweeping views and quick access to Market Street.
- **Notable perks**: Daily catered lunches and snacks with flexible dietary options, unlimited PTO, comprehensive health insurance (medical/dental/vision), unlimited budget for productivity tools, commuter benefits, allowance for continuing education, 401k with 6% match.
- **Engineering culture**: A strong technical focus (backend and frontend engineers) working on state-of-the-art AI and NLP. 9 active job postings across sales, engineering, marketing, design, and operations.
- **Who should apply**: People passionate about AI, user research, and building products that make human understanding scalable. The company values balance, growth, and high-impact work without "startup toxicity."

## Sources
1. [outset.ai](https://outset.ai/)
2. [outset.ai/careers](https://outset.ai/careers)
3. [linkedin.com/company/outset-ai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/outset-ai)
4. [ycombinator.com/companies/outset](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/outset)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/outset](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/outset)

## Other roles at Outset

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- [Platform Security Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/platform-security-engineer-outset-san-francisco-t92pgz80ddez) — San Francisco, CA
- [Researcher](https://feeny.ai/job/researcher-outset-san-francisco-agq2gg9angkn) — San Francisco, CA
- [Head of Workplace Operations](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-workplace-operations-outset-san-francisco-ss1by8ah9192) — San Francisco, CA
- [IT Automation Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/it-automation-engineer-outset-san-francisco-51s41knafzqw) — San Francisco, CA
- [Recruiting Coordinator](https://feeny.ai/job/recruiting-coordinator-outset-san-francisco-ty8cq9r4xk9w) — San Francisco, CA
- [Product Marketing Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/product-marketing-manager-outset-san-francisco-hv2qcx62mr95) — San Francisco, CA
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- [Research Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/research-manager-outset-san-francisco-9gv2eapx6xyq) — San Francisco, CA
- [Program Manager - Research Operations](https://feeny.ai/job/program-manager-research-operations-outset-san-francisco-4h9qpq7d39j0) — San Francisco, CA