Enterprise-AI Sales Development Representative (SDR)

About Zeko AI

Zeko AI builds AI agents for hiring and talent evaluation. Our core product, Avya, runs structured L1 interviews end to end. It's a real conversation with an AI avatar that adapts its follow-up questions to what the candidate actually says, then produces a scored, evidence-backed report a recruiter can act on in under three minutes.

Around that sits a full stack: resume and recruiter screening, voice-based candidate engagement, post-offer follow-up, L2 panel scheduling, proctored assessments, job validation, and AskAvya, a layer that lets a hiring manager interrogate a candidate report in plain language.

Where we are

• Growing 20% quarter on quarter. Unit economics that work per account, not growth bought with discounts.
• Enterprise customers with high renewal rates. Persistent, Nagarro, Orion Innovation, Sopra Steria, Schneider Electric, Cholamandalam, Shadowfax, Pierian Services.
• We survive enterprise scrutiny. InfoSec reviews at Banks and global IT services firms, EU AI Act clauses, DPDPA, SLA and uptime commitments we wrote ourselves. ISO 27001, SOC 2, ISO 42001 and ISO 27701 are in progress. For a seller this matters: it means the deals you work are real, and they close.
• Best AI Startup awarded 25 lacs by Hon’ble Minister of Electronics and IT at India AI Summit. Top 20 Startups among 10,000+ applications at UAE-India CEPA Council.

Why this is a good seat

The category is being created right now, and we are early in it. Every enterprise TA function in India is being asked what it is doing about AI. Most do not have an answer. You will not spend your quarter explaining why the problem exists, you will spend it showing a buyer a better way to run something they already do badly.

We sell to serious buyers. TA Heads, CHROs, L&D Heads, CISOs, transformation leaders. Deals run ₹5L to ₹1Cr+ with pilots, security reviews and procurement. This is enterprise selling with a real cycle, not transactional SaaS.

You get founder-level context. The CEO runs sales directly. You will not be three layers away from the person who sets pricing, ships the product and talks to the board. Decisions that take a quarter elsewhere take a day here.

High AI exposure to improve performance. An AI coach runs over our own call recordings. Your demos and negotiations get reviewed against evidence, not impressions. If you want to get materially better at selling within twelve months, the instrumentation for that already exists.

The next eighteen months are the interesting ones. The plan is 6x growth in ARR. Whoever joins now builds the function rather than inherits it: the playbook, the verticals, the team. That is a different experience from joining at ₹100 Cr, and it is the honest reason to pick us.

About the Role

You open conversations with enterprise TA and L&D leaders who have never heard of us, and you get them into a room with an Account Executive. That is the job. Everything else is detail.

The real version of this role

This is not a lead-list job. You are not handed a spreadsheet and told to dial it. You research a target account, work out whether they genuinely have the hiring problem Zeko AI solves, and if they do not, you take them off your list and say why. We would rather have twenty meetings that convert than eighty that clog a calendar.

That means your number is not meetings booked. It is meetings the Account Executive accepts. If an AE rejects a meeting within 24 hours with a written reason, it does not count. They have to give you the reason, so you learn something each time. That rule exists to protect you from the trap this role usually falls into.

The hardest part is the first ninety seconds of a cold call with a TA Head who is busy and slightly irritated. The best people in this seat get good at that fast, and the way they get good is by being corrected on a real recording and trying again the same afternoon.

What you own

• Research and prospecting into a named set of enterprise accounts
• Cold calls, email and LinkedIn outreach that is written from actual research, not a template at volume
• Qualification: testing whether the account genuinely fits before you book anything
• A clean, same-day CRM record. Your pipeline should be a true picture of your week without anyone asking
• A handoff that gives the AE real context: who is in the room, the problem in the prospect's own words, the volume, and what was promised
• Sitting silently in the discovery calls and demos that follow your meetings: this is how you learn the next job

What good looks like after twelve months

• You consistently hit the accepted-meeting number, and your rejection rate has fallen every quarter
• You can explain why four out of six companies are a bad fit, with reasons a buyer would recognise
• You have sourced at least one deal that closed, start to finish, from an account nobody gave you
• A new joiner can read your handoff notes and know what to do
• You are ready to be considered for an Account Executive seat

You will do well here if

• You take a correction and use it on the next call, not next month
• You can be told no forty times and make the forty-first call properly
• You are precise: right name, right title, right context, every time
• You move fast on a warm signal instead of waiting for the weekly review
• You get curious about a business rather than reciting a pitch at it

What this role is not

• It is not an inbound or a support role. Most of your pipeline you create.
• It is not a script-reading job, and it is not a numbers-only job. Booking a meeting you know is unqualified in order to hit a target is the fastest way to fail here.
• It is not a holding pattern. The path to Account Executive is written down, and two of the last four people in this seat were being developed for it.

What we offer

Competitive base plus variable tied to accepted meetings and sourced pipeline. Structured coaching on your own recordings every week. Full visibility of what happens to your meetings after you hand them over. A written, evidence-based path to Account Executive rather than a conversation about it when you ask.

How we hire

We do not run interviews on impressions. Every role is assessed against the same written competencies with the same rating scale, and every rating has to point at something you actually did or something we watched you do in the process.

Expect live exercises rather than only conversation: a cold-call roleplay for the SDR seat, a negotiation roleplay for the AE seat, a coaching exercise on a real call recording for the Team Lead seat. You will be told what each exercise is testing before it starts. We would rather see you work than hear you describe working.

Your interview ratings are shared with you and become the baseline for your first quarterly review, so the process is also the start of your development plan.

Stage and Turnaround Time

1. AI Interview with functional depth, with our AI, Avya- so that you experience what we sell. Role fitment, knowledge and attitude. When: Instantly when you apply, if you are shortlisted.
2. Competency interview with live exercises, with Sales Lead or CEO. When: 24-48 hours of AI Interview
3. Conversation with the Founders. When: 4-5 working days after Stage 2
4. Reference checks, then offer. When: within 4-5 working days after Stage 3

What we will not pretend about

• We are still building. The playbook exists but it is not finished, and parts of it you will write. If you need a mature system to operate inside, we are not it yet.
• Enterprise cycles are long. Six to twelve months with pilots and security reviews. Your first quarter will not look like your fourth.
• Everyone is close to the work. The CEO reads deal notes. That is useful when you want a decision and uncomfortable if you would rather not be observed.
• We check what we claim. Attainment, meeting numbers and team development claims are verified at reference stage before an offer, not after.

How to apply

Apply at the link, you will be directed to a conversation with Avya. Complete it and you will hear from us within 24 hours for the next interview.