Full-Time
Regional Sales Director
Updated on 9/4/2026
CIQ
51-200 employees
Open-source Linux platform for enterprise infrastructure
No salary listed
San Francisco, CA, USA + 2 more
More locations: Los Angeles, CA, USA | Irvine, CA, USA
In Person
Field-based role; home base in San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Orange County, California; travel as required.
Bachelor's
 Sales & Account Management (1) |
|---|
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- 10–12+ years of B2B enterprise sales experience selling infrastructure/software into North American enterprise accounts
- 5+ years in a sales management or player-coach role, with direct experience leading teams of 5 or more reps
- Consistent quota attainment (≥100%) across multiple years, including personal carry
- Deep fluency in MEDDPICC, MEDDIC, Challenger, or equivalent - and demonstrated ability to coach reps to apply it
- Hands-on operator on HubSpot or Salesforce for forecasting, pipeline management, and deal hygiene
- Experience selling software, SaaS, infrastructure, or open-source-adjacent commercial offerings to IT/engineering buyers
- Based in San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Orange County, CA; comfortable with a field-based role and regular in-market customer travel
- Bachelor's degree or equivalent professional experience
- Personally carry a full Regional Sales Director quota on named strategic accounts within the West territory.
- Run personal outbound/inbound qualification motion; source, advance, and close opportunities end-to-end on assigned named accounts.
- Maintain 3–5x pipeline coverage on personal quota; keep MEDDPICC current on every personal deal.
- Lead, coach, and develop 5+ direct reports (Account Executives / Senior Account Managers) across the region.
- Run weekly deal reviews using MEDDPICC, regular objection-handling, and skills-development clinics.
- Conduct weekly 1:1s, quarterly performance reviews, and document individual development plans.
- Join discovery calls, negotiations, and key customer meetings alongside reps on top accounts.
- Own hiring, onboarding/ramp, and performance management for the regional team.
- Own regional pipeline build and coverage discipline against quarterly team quota.
- Submit weekly regional forecast to the VP Sales with commitment/upside/downside discipline.
- Maintain HubSpot hygiene across the regional team (stage, next step, close date, MEDDPICC fields).
- Enforce the MEDDPICC framework on every qualified opportunity in the region.
- Build and own account plans for the region's top strategic accounts; multi-thread into top accounts.
- Own territory planning - validate and tier accounts T1/T2/T3; align rep assignments across the team's book.
- Provide region-specific feedback to Marketing on ICP, messaging, and content gaps.
- Partner with Channel/Partner head to activate regional SI/GSI and reseller partner relationships for co-sell motions.
- Represent CIQ at regional industry events and customer engagements as needed.
- Direct experience at enterprise infrastructure / open-source companies.
- Familiarity with Linux, HPC, AI infrastructure, or DevOps/cloud-native ecosystems.
- Prior experience building a region or team from an early stage - establishing playbooks and cadences from first principles.
- Existing network among West Coast enterprise IT, HPC, or AI infrastructure buyers.
CIQ provides Linux-based infrastructure solutions for enterprises, focusing on a secure, open-source platform. Its products secure the software supply chain from build to server, reveal CVEs on every host, and offer FIPS-compliant, hardened, long-term supported images. The company supports AWS, GCP, OCI, Azure, on-premises, OEM hardware, and edge deployments with migration, management, and support services. Its goal is to help businesses run secure, reliable, and efficient Linux infrastructure at scale across diverse environments.
Company Size
51-200
Company Stage
Series A
Total Funding
$30M
Headquarters
Reno, Nevada
Founded
2020
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Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- August 2026 federal launches position CIQ for agencies needing three-day CVE remediation.
- AMD partnership and DGX Spark support expand CIQ into AI and HPC infrastructure budgets.
- Enterprise Linux Manager, C3, and self-service portal reduce adoption friction and shorten sales cycles.
What critics are saying
- Red Hat still dominates enterprise Linux renewals, compressing CIQ’s pricing power through 2027.
- CIQ’s federal bet hinges on BOD 26-04 and 2026-2027 compliance deadlines; slip destroys momentum.
- Rocky Linux community goodwill can break if CIQ monetizes too aggressively and forks erode adoption.
What makes CIQ unique
- Gregory Kurtzer’s CIQ owns Rocky Linux’s commercial stack, from RLC Pro to Ascender Pro.
- CIQ bundles FIPS, hardened images, fleet management, and CVE remediation into one enterprise platform.
- Fuzzball spans AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, CoreWeave, and on-premises AI and HPC.
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Benefits
Health Insurance
Dental Insurance
Vision Insurance
Remote Work Options
Stock Options
Growth & Insights and Company News
6 month growth
↓ -2%1 year growth
↓ -3%2 year growth
↑ 6%Gregory Kurtzer, founder of Rocky Linux and CentOS, has launched OpenWALDO, an open source project building a shared corpus of AI training data. Sponsored by CIQ, the project aims to provide a transparent foundation for AI development, addressing issues like model collapse and unclear data provenance. OpenWALDO offers an AI Bill of Materials that traces sources, licences, and training runs, allowing developers to verify and build upon a common baseline. The project addresses the industry's problem of duplicated foundational work, where each AI team assembles training material independently. The community-governed initiative is open to individuals, researchers, and companies. CIQ, founded by Kurtzer in 2020, supports the project whilst the community maintains governance. Contributors can join via Slack and GitHub to participate in developing the public corpus.
CIQ, the founding commercial sponsor of Rocky Linux, has launched CIQ Enterprise Linux Manager (ELM), a fleet management tool included in all RLC Pro subscriptions. ELM allows enterprise Linux teams to control which updates reach their systems by requiring explicit approval before deployment. The platform enables teams to review, test, and approve security patches and software updates through a single checkpoint. Updates can be rolled forward or back as needed. Unlike traditional fleet management tools sold separately, ELM comes standard with RLC Pro and operates on customers' own infrastructure, including fully disconnected environments. ELM integrates with Ascender Pro, CIQ's configuration management system, synchronising vulnerability and inventory data across platforms. The system can prepare update sets significantly faster than legacy tools whilst maintaining thorough review processes. CIQ Enterprise Linux Manager is now generally available for RLC Pro customers.
CIQ launched RLC Pro Hardened and Ascender Pro deployment for US federal agencies, providing real-time kernel exploit detection and automated remediation within CISA's Binding Operational Directive 26-04 compliance framework. The directive requires federal systems to remediate highest-risk vulnerabilities within three days of appearing in the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalogue. RLC Pro Hardened is the first Enterprise Linux distribution shipping with runtime kernel exploitation detection enabled by default through Linux Kernel Runtime Guard. The system validates kernel integrity continuously and records exploitation as it occurs, before patches become available. Ascender Pro adds Reaqt, an event-driven engine that monitors fleet logs and automatically executes remediation playbooks. The combined deployment addresses compliance gaps when exploits emerge before patches are released. Agency remediation policies must support BOD 26-04 by 7 August 2026.
CIQ, the founding commercial sponsor of Rocky Linux, has announced new features for its Ascender Pro automation platform. The platform now automatically detects and fixes problems across Enterprise Linux fleets without human intervention. New additions include Ascender Reaqt, which watches inventory and fixes issues automatically, and Ascender Registry, which gives teams control over collections and containers. Federated Inventories speeds up job routing to the correct inventory. CIQ has also open sourced Galaxy Proxy, a caching layer that reduces wait times for Ansible Galaxy responses by 75 to 80 percent. The tool is available to the wider Ansible community, whilst Ascender Pro customers receive the full Registry application. Ascender Reaqt, Ascender Registry and Federated Inventories are now available to existing Ascender Pro customers.
CIQ has announced that its Fuzzball platform now delivers a production-ready AI compute and inference environment for NVIDIA DGX Spark. The platform enables AI teams to develop, tune and deploy workloads on a single DGX Spark system, then scale to thousands of GPUs without rebuilding. Fuzzball eliminates months of infrastructure assembly by providing ready-to-run environments with built-in workflow templates. The platform supports sovereign AI deployments where data cannot leave premises, allowing private model tuning whilst maintaining infrastructure control. Multiple DGX Spark systems can work together under a common Fuzzball environment, with seamless scaling to larger NVIDIA GPU deployments. The platform bridges local DGX Spark systems with HPC clusters and cloud capacity under a single operational model, addressing the traditional split between AI experimentation and production deployment.