Founding Head of GTM - Cipherscale

The Opportunity: Zero-to-one category creation for AI-Native Zero Trust Access

Cipherscale is building an AI-native Zero Trust access and enforcement plane for humans, software/workloads, and AI agents.

The product doctrine is simple: AI may reason and propose; deterministic policy authorizes; trusted enforcement executes.

We are looking for a commercial founder/operator who can turn that architecture into a category, a repeatable customer problem, real deployments, and initial revenue.

Mission: discover and prove the repeatable commercial truth for Cipherscale - who urgently needs it, what gets them to deploy, what makes them pay, and what causes them to expand.

What You Own

• Own ICP discovery, exclusion criteria, buyer/champion mapping, problem validation, positioning, initial wedge, and design-partner recruitment.
• Personally lead early customer discovery, technical/commercial conversations, executive outreach, design-partner conversion, and initial closing.
• Build an evidence-driven GTM system: every important assumption has supporting/contradicting evidence and a next falsification test.
• Use AI agents aggressively for research, account intelligence, personalization, competitive monitoring, meeting preparation, call synthesis, content, and experiment analysis.
• Work directly with the CEO on category creation and major strategic accounts.
• Work with Product and Engineering to convert recurring customer evidence into governed product inputs - without turning prospect anecdotes into roadmap commitments.
• Define the first repeatable acquisition, deployment, conversion, and expansion motion before scaling a team.

What This Role Is Not

• It is not a traditional marketing leadership job.
• It is not an MQL, impressions, content-calendar, or brand-campaign role.
• It is not a decision to hire SDR, demand-gen, content, and marketing-ops teams before product-market evidence exists.
• It is not ownership of OpenVPN growth. Rod, Head of Growth, owns the established-business growth mandate;

This role is focused on Cipherscale zero-to-one GTM and must collaborate cleanly without duplicating authority.

Important

• This is a full-time remote job, and it will be a long-term B2B contract.
• This can be a permanent employment opportunity for candidates based in Spain, Poland, and Germany.

Our philosophy is that we are a small, close-knit team, and we care deeply about you:

• Highly competitive salary + Bonus
• Fully remote work environments.
• Self-managed time off.

Who We Want

• You have personally helped take a deeply technical B2B security, infrastructure, identity, developer, cloud, or AI

product from near-zero to repeatable initial revenue.

• You can sit with a CISO, CTO, security architect, platform engineer, and AI-platform leader and earn credibility.
• You understand enough security architecture to reason about identity, delegated authority, credentials, policy,

enforcement, trust boundaries, auditability, and blast radius.

• You are comfortable selling before there is a polished playbook and learning directly from rejection.
• You treat AI as operating leverage. Your instinct is to build agentic workflows before asking for headcount.
• You are analytical enough to distinguish activity from evidence and evidence from causality.
• You are comfortable challenging the CEO and product assumptions when customer evidence disagrees.

Strong Background Signals

• Early-stage Zero Trust, identity, cloud security, developer security, infrastructure security, AI security, developer infrastructure, or adjacent enterprise-security categories.
• Founder, first-GTM, product-led commercial operator, technical seller, or hands-on GTM executive backgrounds can all fit.
• Large-company titles alone are not compelling.

Anti-Profile

• Your first answer to a growth problem is "hire a team."
• You depend on agencies for core positioning or customer discovery.
• You optimize lead volume before proving deployment and retention.
• You cannot personally run technical discovery or executive selling.
• You treat AI as a copywriting assistant rather than an operating system.
• You blur probabilistic AI recommendations with authorization or security enforcement.

First 90 Days: Window Expected outcome

• 0-30 days: 10-15 qualified ICP conversations; ~5 credible design-partner candidates; evidence-backed recommendation on ICP, problem, buyer, positioning, and wedge.
• 31-60 days: Convert the strongest partners into real or production-like deployments; measure time-to-value, blockers, security objections, and willingness to pay.
• 61-90 days: Target 5+ production or production-intent deployments where product readiness permits; first paying customers; prove or disprove repeatability with a second cohort; document the acquisition/onboarding motion.

How Success Is Measured

• Business: paid customers, initial ARR/MRR, expansion and eventually defensible unit economics.
• Customer: time-to-first-value, production activation, repeated authorized usage, protected resources/principals,

retention and expansion.

• Funnel: qualified conversations -> design partners -> deployments -> production -> paid -> expansion.
• Learning velocity: experiment cycle time, evidence quality, speed at which weak assumptions are killed or corrected.

Operating Model and Reporting

• This role works directly with the CEO during zero-to-one discovery and partners closely with Rod, Head of Growth.
• Decision rights will be explicit: CipherScale market discovery cannot become an overlapping second growth
• organization, and OpenVPN growth priorities cannot dilute CipherScale category discovery. As the motion becomes
• repeatable, responsibilities can be consolidated based on evidence rather than titles.

Security Expectations

You will operate with customer and prospect data, AI agents, email/CRM systems, call transcripts, and potentially

technical environments. Treat agents as potentially compromised actors. Use scoped identities, least privilege,

deterministic authorization for external actions, credential isolation, customer-data boundaries, prompt-injection

defenses, audit trails, and human approval for high-impact commitments until explicitly delegated.

Compensation Philosophy

• We would rather pay exceptional compensation and meaningful upside for one outstanding founder-level operator
• than assemble a large conventional GTM organization. Final structure should reflect experience, location, scope, and
• demonstrated ability to create zero-to-one enterprise value.

The Test

• A strong candidate should be able to take the Cipherscale thesis, identify the first market to attack, design the first ten
• customer experiments, explain what evidence would invalidate the strategy, and show how they would use AI to
• execute the work with minimal human headcount.