Sales Commission Lead

About Us

• Fireworks is the platform for specialized intelligence, enabling companies to build, train
• serve AI models tailored to their own data, workflows
• products. Founded by the team behind PyTorch and backed by AMD, Atreides, Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures, Lightspeed, NVIDIA, Sequoia Capital
• TCV, Fireworks powers production AI with hundreds of state-of-the-art open models across text, image, embedding, audio
• multimodal workloads. Today, Fireworks is a Series D company valued at $17.5 billion, bringing together an ambitious, collaborative team that's building the future of enterprise AI.
• About Fireworks
• Fireworks is the AI inference infrastructure platform built for teams who need speed, control
• the ability to fine-tune at scale. We're a Series C company valued at $4B, backed by Benchmark, Sequoia, Lightspeed
• Index. Our customers include Cursor, Cognition, GitHub, Meta
• a growing base of enterprise AI teams who've outgrown generic API providers.
• The Role
• Reporting to the VP of Revenue Operations, the Sales Commissions Lead owns sales compensation end-to-end: plan strategy and design, field communication, dispute resolution, forecasting of commission expense
• the systems that turn closed deals and usage into accurate, trusted payouts.
• This is not a pure admin seat and not a blank-slate build. You inherit a working in-house commissions stack and extend it — plan docs, calculators, data pipelines, reporting
• payout workflows — while partnering tightly with FP&A, HR/People Ops, Sales leadership
• Data Engineering. You will own compensation for a rapidly scaling GTM org (300+ commissionable sellers across pre-sales and post-sales roles).
• Consumption and hybrid commit + usage economics are core to how we sell and how we pay. The right candidate has already owned commissions in a usage-based or hybrid commercial model — not only license ARR — and can design plans that drive the right field behavior without breaking Finance trust.
• The right candidate is an AI-native builder: hands-on with agentic tools (Cursor, Claude Code, or equivalent), shipping automation into the commissions operating system rather than managing a spreadsheet forever.
• Responsibilities
• Plan Strategy & Design
• Own sales compensation plan strategy and execution across AE, manager, and pre-/post-sales overlay roles.
• Design and iterate consumption-aware and hybrid commit + usage plans that align seller incentives with company goals (new logos, expansion, and healthy revenue mix).
• Partner with Sales leadership, FP&A, and HR on plan changes, mid-period policy decisions, and clear field communication — including how changes are grandfathered and measured after the fact.
• Payout Operations & Trust
• Own the quarter close for commissions: eligibility, calculations, exceptions, audits, and payout packages Sales and Finance will stand behind.
• Run dispute resolution with judgment — protect plan integrity while staying credible with FLMs and reps.
• Maintain definitional clarity (what counts as commissionable production, how credit is assigned, how overlays interact) and keep plan language, exhibits, and systems in sync.
• Systems, Forecasting & Automation
• Inherit and extend our in-house commissions tooling and data pipelines — do not rip-and-replace for a vendor by default.
• Drive end-to-end automation of plan modeling, commission forecasting, attainment reporting, and payout production.
• Partner with Data Engineering and GTM Engineering on source-of-truth data (CRM, billing/usage, roster/quotas) so calculations are reproducible and auditable.
• Cross-Functional Partnership
• Be the commissions point of contact for Sales VPs/FLMs, FP&A (commission expense and accruals), HR (exhibits, offers, terminations), and Data Eng.
• Produce executive-ready views of commission cost, plan health, and incentive risk — recommendations, not just tables.
• AI-Native Operations
• Build agentic workflows into how commissions runs: rule interpretation, edge-case triage, rep-facing explanations, regression checks on plan changes, and automated reporting.
• Raise the bar for what "done" looks like: machine-readable plan logic, versioned assumptions, and tooling the field can self-serve against.
• Qualifications
• 7+ years in sales commissions, incentive compensation, or sales ops with deep commissions ownership; senior IC depth at a P4–P5 equivalent
• Has familiarity with and owned multiple steps of end-to-end commission (plan design + payout ops), not only one side of the house
• Hands-on experience designing and administering plans in a consumption-based or hybrid commit + usage commercial model
• Strong systems builder: SQL (or equivalent) against CRM/billing data; comfortable extending in-house calculators and pipelines rather than only operating a packaged ICM tool
• Proven cross-functional operator with Sales, FP&A, HR, and technical partners — can say no to a bad exception and still keep trust
• Actively building with AI/agentic tools in current work; can name specific automation they've shipped (not "I use ChatGPT")
• Excellent written communication: can explain plan mechanics to a rep in plain language and to Finance in audit-ready form
• Preferred
• Experience at an AI/ML infrastructure, developer tools, or API-first company
• Has scaled commissions through a high-growth headcount ramp (hundreds of sellers)
• Familiarity with manager overrides, overlay roles (e.g. SAs / field engineers), marketplace/channel credit, and self-serve → sales-assisted conversion credit
• Prior ownership of commission expense forecasting / accruals partnership with FP&A
• Total compensation for this role also includes meaningful equity in a fast-growing startup, along with a competitive salary and comprehensive benefits package. Base salary is determined by a range of factors including individual qualifications, experience, skills, interview performance, market data
• work location. The listed salary range is intended as a guideline and may be adjusted.
• Base Pay Range (Plus Equity)
• $180,000 — $225,000 USD
• Why Fireworks AI?
• Solve Hard Problems: Tackle challenges at the forefront of AI infrastructure, from low-latency inference to scalable model serving.
• Build What’s Next: Work with bleeding-edge technology that impacts how businesses and developers harness AI globally.
• Ownership & Impact: Join a fast-growing, passionate team where your work directly shapes the future of AI—no bureaucracy, just results.
• Learn from the Best: Collaborate with world-class engineers and AI researchers who thrive on curiosity and innovation.
• Fireworks AI is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all innovators.