Sales Commission Lead

About Fireworks

Fireworks is the AI inference infrastructure platform built for teams who need speed, control, and the ability to fine-tune at scale. We're a Series C company valued at $4B, backed by Benchmark, Sequoia, Lightspeed, and Index. Our customers include Cursor, Cognition, GitHub, Meta, and 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, and 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, and payout workflows — while partnering tightly with FP&A, HR/People Ops, Sales leadership, and 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