Opscode is hiring a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO)

As many of you know, over the past 18 months, Chef has become the standard for cloud infrastructure automation, and is used by RightScale, EngineYard, VMware, Rackspace, OpenStack, and many others. Chef works anywhere: in data-centers, inside virtual machines, on desktops, and in the cloud. Thousands of organizations use Chef to manage their infrastructure in environments as small as a single node, to enterprises managing tens of thousands of systems. Chef has the largest contributor base of any open source configuration management project in history and gets bigger & better every day.

Since launching the Opscode Platform in June, over 1000 organizations & individuals have signed up to use the Opscode Platform to manage thousands of nodes. In short, things are going really well here thanks to the hard work by a number of people.

Why we are looking for a CRO:

When we started Opscode, we assumed it would take 1-2 years for enterprises & larger organizations to begin using the Opscode Platform, and that it would take us 6+ months to actually close the first big deals. We’d use that time to staff based on what we had learned from self-service signups & organic growth. We planned to start slow, grow incrementally, and tune along the way.

Since launching the Opscode Platform a few weeks ago, we learned that we were wrong about how long this would take. Instead of months… it happened instantly, which means that we need to ramp up our business operations now.

With some of the foundation already in place (we’ve closed several deals), we realized that was the right time to bring in a new member of our executive team.

Who you are:

You will be Opscode’s Chief Revenue Officer, responsible for helping us grow from our first few deals to hundreds of millions of dollars in recurring revenue in a very short time. You have years of experience and a burning passion for building great businesses.

You understand and are excited about Open Source communities. You love Software as a Service, which means you love customers and know that success means establishing many long-term relationships built on mutual trust & customer satisfaction.

You are ready to join an amazing team, with an incredible product, supported by a huge community, in a great market, at a critical time.

Position Description:

The Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) will be responsible for refinement, testing, and execution of the company’s go to market strategy. This would include optimizing the company’s sales approach (direct sales, partner based, web-based, etc.) and then successfully implementing that strategy. Success will be demonstrated rapid growth in revenue and widespread adoption as Chef as the de facto technology platform for server automation.

The Chief Revenue Officer will report to Jesse Robbins, the company’s CEO.

Responsibilities:

• Develop and implement a plan to create demand and achieve revenue growth. This may involve one or more potential streams of revenue.
• Create, install, and manage a revenue generation process from demand creation to closed sales for each revenue stream.
• Optimize all the drivers of direct sales, including team, technology, spend and programs, to achieve predictability, cost-efficiency, and scale. This will include the development and monitoring of key historical business metrics, as well as quarterly and annual forecasts that will both be used to manage the business.
• Set individual and organization-wide goals, objectives, budgets, sales targets and quotas support the organization’s long-range strategic objectives
• Cultivate and close key accounts and strategic partners through prospecting and relationship management.
• Create and implement marketing initiatives that support the go-to-market plan.
• Work with other members of the executive team so that their functional groups are supporting the company’s go-to-market activities

Required Skills and Responsibilities:

• Minimum 10+ years of relevant, executive sales and marketing management experience in SaaS. Strong experience with web Infrastructure and data center infrastructure. Experience with Open Source is an advantage, but not required. (Excitement about working with Open Source Software and community is required.)
• Deep understanding of SaaS business metrics and their business drivers.
• Proven success and scaling emerging companies from early revenue to $50 million and beyond. This is someone who should bring instant credibility because of his/her accomplishments.
• Able to participate and play a key role on the executive management team, significantly contributing to the overall corporate strategy. Able to communicate strategic customer insight, and contribute to the long-term direction of Opscode.
• While start-up experience is preferred, it is imperative that the individual possesses an entrepreneurial mindset and a roll-up-the-sleeves work ethic. He/she must be comfortable with ambiguity and rapid rates of change.
• Demonstrated track record of attracting, recruiting, retaining, and mentoring world-class sales talent, as well as successful individual sales contribution.
• Able to make tough decisions – not always be nice, but direct and honest.
• Undergraduate degree or exceptional industry experience is required.
• Located in or willing to relocate to Seattle, WA.
• Awesomeness trumps all other requirements.

Compensation:

We will construct an attractive compensation package consisting of salary and significant equity participation.

Application Submissions:

Send your resume or a simple introduction to chief-revenue-officer-job@opscode.com. Principals only, please, no recruiters.