---
title: 'Founding Account Executive (Italian Speaker) at Sona'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/founding-account-executive-italian-speaker-sona-london-5nyhkv64x6gz'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-31'
---

# Founding Account Executive (Italian Speaker) at Sona

- **Company:** Sona
- **Location:** London, United Kingdom
- **Compensation:** £80k–£120k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-10-28
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-31
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sona/555c71a3-191f-4e7e-bbfc-5829de9289fc

## Job description

## About Sona

Frontline work keeps the world running. Restaurants, hospitals, schools, nurseries, airlines, stores, emergency services. Together they employ 80% of the global workforce, over 3 billion people, and they're among the hardest businesses anywhere to run. By-the-minute scheduling, HR and payroll make them far more operationally complex than the average office, yet just 1% of venture funding has ever gone to software built for them. Rising costs, wage increases, labour shortages and tighter regulation have made fixing that urgent. Sona is the AI-native workforce management platform for frontline organisations, with agents that match staffing to real demand and take the admin load off managers. That's a $500bn+ market the software industry has mostly walked past. We've raised over $100M from N47, Felicis, Gradient and Northzone, signed more than 100 enterprise customers across the UK and US, and opened offices in London, New York, Austin and Lisbon. More on working at Sona here (https://www.sona.ai/careers).

## About the Role

We're hiring a Founding Account Executive to win Sona's first customers in Italy and open the market for us. This is a senior, seller-first role, and you'll run every conversation with prospects in Italian, from the first call to the close. Our expansion into Europe is starting now and ramps up through 2027 across key markets. Italy is one of them, and you'll own the go-to-market launch there. Colleagues across Sona will be running the product, operations and other launch activities, so your focus is winning customers, building partnerships and creating the collateral to sell. With no sales team in market yet, you'll work with less support than a typical AE, and the team around you will grow as the market does.

Day to day, you'll decide which Retail and Hospitality accounts to go after, from mid-market through to enterprise, and run consultative sales conversations yourself. You'll also build what a new market needs, including partnerships and Italian-language collateral. The platform is already localised for Italy, and you'll have product and solutions support. It's early, and the ground will shift as we learn what works. If you want a structured environment with lots of support around you, this won't be the right fit. If you want to shape how Sona sells in Italy from the start, it could be exactly that. The role is office-based in London, with travel to Italy as needed.

## Responsibilities

- Lead the go-to-market launch in Italy and win Sona's first customers, taking each deal from first conversation to close.
- Build your own pipeline across Retail and Hospitality, from mid-market to enterprise.
- Run strategic, consultative sales conversations in Italian.
- Build and run partnerships that open doors in the Italian market.
- Create the collateral Sona needs to sell in Italy.
- Work with Sona's Strategy and Expansion Lead on where to focus and how to approach the market.
- Feed what you learn from the market back to our Commercial and Product teams.
- Travel to Italy as the role requires.

## Requirements

- You're a native Italian speaker, comfortable selling and negotiating in Italian, with fluent English for working with colleagues in London.
- You have a senior Account Executive track record of winning new business, ideally across mid-market and enterprise deals.
- You have a founder mentality. You take ownership, make decisions with limited information, and are happy building without a playbook.
- You're strategic and consultative in how you sell, and you work well independently with less support than most AEs get.
- You're comfortable creating partnerships and collateral from scratch.
- You're based in London, or able to be, and happy to travel to Italy as the role needs.
- Strongly preferred: Spanish, French or German as an additional language. It doesn't replace Italian.

## Benefits

- Salary: £80,000 - £120,000 base depending on experience, with OTE of £160,000 - £240,000
- Office-based in our London office, with travel to Italy as the role requires
- Share options
- 35 days annual leave (25 days standard plus 10 flexible public holiday days)
- Extra day of leave for every year of service
- Pension contributions matched up to 5%
- Comprehensive health insurance
- Enhanced parental leave & pay
- Salary sacrifice childcare scheme (Workplace Nursery)
- Annual all expenses paid team retreats
- The latest Macbook and equipment budget for your home office
- Professional development budget
- Unlimited free books

Note: this represents a typical benefits package for a UK-based, full-time employee. Exact details may vary based on location and employment type but we try to be as fair as possible to all of our team members. Please ask your contact in the Talent team to clarify the available benefits for you.

## About Sona

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Sona is a next-generation, AI-powered workforce management platform built for large, complex frontline enterprises in hospitality, social care, retail, and logistics.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B, $45M raised April 2026)
- **Headquarters**: London, United Kingdom
- **Founded**: 2021
- **Founders**: Steffen Wulff Petersen (CEO), Oli Johnson (CFO), Ben Dixon (CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Workforce Management (WFM) Software, Human Capital Management (HCM), AI for Frontline Operations
- **Target customers**: Large, multi-site frontline enterprises with 250+ employees in hospitality, social care, retail, and logistics (B2B, Enterprise).
- **Mission or purpose statement**: To future-proof frontline operators with intelligent AI, replacing outdated legacy systems and unifying scheduling, HR, payroll, and engagement.

## Products & Services
- **Sona Platform**: An end-to-end, AI-first workforce management platform that combines Scheduling, Time & Attendance, HR, Payroll, and Employee Engagement. It is designed for complex, multi-site operations with variable demand.
- **Raffy (AI Assistant)**: An AI-powered assistant that helps managers make better decisions by providing real-time actionable insights, demand forecasting, and automated scheduling recommendations.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Key Metric**: Total funding of **$115.5M**. Annual revenue is estimated at **$2.5M** (as of latest reports).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: N47 (lead), Felicis, Northzone, Gradient Ventures (Google's AI Fund), Italian Founders Fund, Speedinvest. Senior Advisor: David Campbell (former Chairman/CEO of Wagamama, PizzaExpress, The Ivy Collection).
- **Growth Signals**: 
    - Headcount grew **46% YoY** to 133 employees.
    - Raised $45M Series B in April 2026.
    - Has acquired companies (Yapster, Employee Republic Limited) to expand capabilities.
    - Customers include major brands like Hawksmoor, Popeyes UK, Paul Bakery, Côte, Voyage Care, and others.
    - Claims customers typically reduce labour costs by at least 1% in the first month.

## Competitive Advantages
- **AI-first Architecture**: Unlike legacy platforms that retrofit AI, Sona was built from day one with AI at its core, enabling deeper integration and smarter automation.
- **Deep Industry Expertise**: The founders previously ran a frontline business with over 10,000 employees, giving them firsthand understanding of complex operational challenges.
- **End-to-End Platform**: Unifies Scheduling, HR, Payroll, and Engagement into a single system, reducing the need for multiple vendors.
- **Measurable Impact**: Proven ROI with customers seeing 1-2% labour cost reduction in the first month and 25%+ EBITDA improvement at enterprise scale.

## Strategic Focus
- **Current priorities**: Scaling the platform to become the category leader in AI-powered frontline workforce management. Deepening AI capabilities (demand forecasting, automated scheduling) and expanding into new verticals and geographies.
- **Direction for growth**: Continuing to win large enterprise customers, expanding the partner ecosystem, and leveraging AI to automate more operational decisions.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Values include being "AI Everywhere" (AI-first in thinking and work), "Relentless" (full ownership of outcomes), "Curious" (deep knowledge of product and customers), and "Speed" (moving fast and acting with conviction).
- **Remote/Hybrid Policy**: Operates a **remote-first model** with offices in London, New York, Austin, and Lisbon. The company covers the cost of co-working spaces for those outside office locations. The team comes together twice a year for full-team retreats.
- **Notable Perks**:
    - **Professional Development**: Quarterly £200 budget for courses, conferences, books, and learning.
    - **Equipment**: £600 new starter budget for home office setup, plus a new MacBook. Supplementary £300 annual budget.
    - **Leave**: 25 days holiday + 10 flexible public holidays, with 1 extra day per year of tenure. Enhanced parental leave: 26 weeks full pay for primary parent, 8 weeks full pay for secondary parent.
    - **Health & Finance**: Comprehensive health insurance (Bupa in eligible countries), pension contribution (up to 5% match), and share options for all permanent employees.

## Sources
1. [getsona.com (Careers)](https://www.getsona.com/careers)
2. [linkedin.com (Sona)](https://uk.linkedin.com/company/getsona)
3. [sona.ai (About)](https://www.sona.ai/about)
4. [builtin.com (Sona)](https://builtin.com/company/sona-getsonacom)
5. [remotecorgi.co.uk (Sona)](https://www.remotecorgi.co.uk/companies/sona)

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