---
title: 'Founding GTM Lead (North America) at adaption'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/founding-gtm-lead-north-america-adaption-united-states-hckjtb0982gr'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-12'
---

# Founding GTM Lead (North America) at adaption

- **Company:** adaption
- **Location:** United States
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-07-18
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-12
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/adaption/f77f1f8d-018d-4ca4-91ac-205541acad02

## Job description

## The Role

We're looking for a Founding GTM Lead to help build the commercial engine behind a new category of AI. This isn't a role for someone looking to inherit a territory or a quota. It's for someone who wants to help define how an AI company goes to market. Sales is only part of the job. You'll shape positioning, influence product, build relationships with technical buyers, and figure out what repeatable GTM actually looks like. You will report directly to the Founders and have a seat at the table for all major strategic decisions.

## Why this role matters

- True 0-to-1: You won't be following a playbook; you will be the architect of it.
- Product Influence: You will be the "eyes and ears" in the market, directly influencing what our engineering team builds next.
- High Leverage: You are the first boots on the ground in the world's most competitive market (North America).

## Responsibilities

- Architect the Playbook: Define our ICP (Ideal Customer Profile), design our outreach sequences, and build the initial sales assets (decks, demos, white papers).
- Full-Cycle Ownership: From cold outbound and technical discovery to procurement and closing.
- Build the Network: Show up where our buyers actually gather - the conferences, the dinners, the industry events. Our best customers won't come from sequences. They'll come from trust you've earned.
- The Feedback Loop: Distill complex prospect objections into actionable product requirements. You are the bridge between "what the market wants" and "what we build."
- Tech Stack Ownership: Stand up the GTM stack (CRM, data enrichment, sequencing tools) with an eye toward automation and clean data from Day 1.

## Qualifications

- The "Early Stage" Pedigree: 4-8 years of experience, ideally as a founding or "first 5" sales hire at a high-growth Series A/B startup. You've seen the transition from "founder-led selling" to "scaled GTM".
- Founder DNA: Bonus points if you've founded something of your own. Even if you haven't, you've sold with no brand behind you - just conviction - and you know exactly what that takes.
- The Relationship Builder: You play the long game. You'd rather earn genuine trust over months than blast volume, and your best deals come from people who believe in you.
- AI/Technical Native: You don't need to be an engineer, but you should be able to have a real technical conversation. Our buyers are CTOs and AI leaders. If every call requires a sales engineer, this probably isn't the right role.
- The "Builder" Mindset: You find manual tasks (like lead sourcing) annoying enough to automate them, but you're scrappy enough to do them by hand if it means closing a deal.
- Exceptional Communication: You know how to write. Cold emails, product feedback, customer notes, LinkedIn posts—it all matters.

## Benefits

- Flexible work: In-person collaboration in the Bay Area, a distributed global-first team, and frequent offsites.
- Adaption Passport: Annual travel stipend to explore a country you've never visited. We're building intelligence that evolves alongside you, so we encourage you to keep expanding your horizons.
- Lunch Stipend: Weekly meal allowance for take-out or grocery delivery.
- Well-Being: Comprehensive medical benefits and generous paid time off.

## About Us

Most AI is frozen in place - it doesn't adapt to the world. We think that's backwards. Our mandate is to build efficient intelligence that evolves in real-time. Our vision is AI systems that are flexible, personalized, and accessible to everyone. We believe efficiency is what makes this possible - it's how we expand access and ensure innovation benefits the many, not the few. We believe in talent density: bringing together the best and most driven individuals to push the boundaries of continual adaptation. We're looking for builders and creative thinkers ready to shape the next era of intelligence.

## About adaption

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Adaption builds adaptive AI systems that learn continuously and efficiently, moving beyond static models and expensive retraining cycles.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed Stage – $50M raised) [Fortune](https://fortune.com/2026/02/04/adaption-labs-50-million-seed-funding-emergence-captial-sara-hooker-sudip-roy-ai-models-that-learn-on-the-fly/)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/adaption-labs)
- **Founded**: Not publicly available (founding team assembled around late 2025 / early 2026)
- **Founders**: Sara Hooker (former VP Research at Cohere) and Sudip Roy (former Director of Inference Computing at Cohere) [Fortune](https://fortune.com/2026/02/04/adaption-labs-50-million-seed-funding-emergence-captial-sara-hooker-sudip-roy-ai-models-that-learn-on-the-fly/)

## Core Business
- **Primary Industry**: Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning
- **Target Customers**: B2B / Enterprise (hiring for Head of Enterprise Sales) [Careers](https://adaptionlabs.ai/careers)
- **Mission / Purpose**: Build extremely efficient AI that adapts in real time, treating constraints like latency, memory, cost, and energy as first-class design inputs so that intelligence evolves through interaction rather than brute-force scaling. [Website](https://adaptionlabs.ai/)

## Products & Services
- **[Adaptive Intelligence Platform]**: A system designed for continuous, on-the-fly learning without costly retraining or extensive prompt engineering. Combines adaptive data shaping, gradient-free learning, and co-designed hardware-algorithms to deliver highly efficient, domain-adaptable AI tailored to each task. [Website](https://adaptionlabs.ai/) – currently in waitlist phase.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not disclosed (company declined to provide) [Fortune](https://fortune.com/2026/02/04/adaption-labs-50-million-seed-funding-emergence-captial-sara-hooker-sudip-roy-ai-models-that-learn-on-the-fly/)
- **Key Metric**: $50M Seed Funding (led by Emergence Capital, with participation from Mozilla Ventures, Fifty Years, Threshold Ventures, Alpha Intelligence Capital, E14 Fund, and Neo) [Fortune](https://fortune.com/2026/02/04/adaption-labs-50-million-seed-funding-emergence-captial-sara-hooker-sudip-roy-ai-models-that-learn-on-the-fly/)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Emergence Capital (lead), Mozilla Ventures, Fifty Years, Threshold Ventures, Alpha Intelligence Capital, E14 Fund, Neo [Fortune](https://fortune.com/2026/02/04/adaption-labs-50-million-seed-funding-emergence-captial-sara-hooker-sudip-roy-ai-models-that-learn-on-the-fly/)
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount of 15 employees with +58.8% monthly growth; 23 active job postings; operates in 5 countries (US, Canada, India, Brazil, Peru); research team has 150+ publications across top AI conferences; backers include key players in AI and venture capital [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/adaption-labs)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Efficiency-first approach**: Unlike most labs chasing scale, Adaption prioritises low compute, low cost, and continuous adaptation – treating constraints as innovation drivers.
- **Real-time learning**: Enables models to update on-the-fly without retraining or fine-tuning, reducing enterprise overhead and latency.
- **World-class research talent**: Team brings deep expertise from Cohere, Google DeepMind, and Carnegie Mellon, with a track record of influential publications (including work on the “slow death of scaling”) [Research Page](https://www.adaptionlabs.ai/research)
- **Co-design of hardware and algorithms**: Systems are built from the ground up with serving constraints in mind, promising better efficiency at scale.

## Strategic Focus
- **Current Priority**: Move from waitlist to product-market fit, hiring across research, engineering, GTM, and design to build and deploy the first generation of adaptive AI for enterprise customers.
- **Direction for Growth**: Expand the platform to multiple industries and specialisations while continuing research into adaptive compute, on-the-fly alignment, and dynamic learning strategies. [Research Page](https://www.adaptionlabs.ai/research)

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Emphasises efficiency, real-world interaction, and product excellence as core design values. The team is small (~15 people), offering high impact and ownership from day one.
- **Work Model**: Hybrid, remote, and onsite options available across locations including San Francisco, New York, Toronto, London, and Singapore [Careers](https://adaptionlabs.ai/careers)
- **Roles**: Open positions in research (Research Scientist, Applied ML Engineer), engineering (Distributed Systems, Inference Platform), GTM (Growth Lead, Head of Enterprise Sales), and design (Product Designer). Contracts and full-time available.
- **Notable Perks**: Work with world-class AI researchers, access to strong funding runway, and the chance to define an entirely new approach to AI that challenges the dominant scaling paradigm.

## Sources
1. [Fortune](https://fortune.com/2026/02/04/adaption-labs-50-million-seed-funding-emergence-captial-sara-hooker-sudip-roy-ai-models-that-learn-on-the-fly/)
2. [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/adaption-labs)
3. [Website](https://adaptionlabs.ai/)
4. [Careers](https://adaptionlabs.ai/careers)
5. [Research Page](https://www.adaptionlabs.ai/research)

## Other roles at adaption

- [Agent Systems Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/agent-systems-engineer-adaption-san-francisco-h8cqnbdpdary) — San Francisco, CA
- [Inference Performance Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/inference-performance-engineer-adaption-san-francisco-4zph5352xw0h) — San Francisco, CA
- [Platform Engineer, APIs and Security](https://feeny.ai/job/platform-engineer-apis-and-security-adaption-san-francisco-m5790sxrdh93) — San Francisco, CA
- [Modelling Resident](https://feeny.ai/job/modelling-resident-adaption-united-kingdom-dvtjh2en67mp) — United Kingdom
- [Senior Research Scientist](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-research-scientist-adaption-united-states-7zjjgvcywxmc) — United States
- [Research Scientist / Research Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/research-scientist-research-engineer-adaption-united-states-gmjs4gbd3y7b) — United States