Job Description
Before you read further or apply, please take note of the following.
- This is a freelance contract, not employment. Ten hours a week for ninety days, with a review at the end.
- You invoice us, so you need to be self-employed or working through your own company, and working in a timezone close to CET.
- As an agency, please do not contact us. We only hire directly.
Company Overview
Located in Leuven, JobRunr is transforming distributed computing and background job processing in Java. With our library, businesses integrate resilient distributed job processing seamlessly into their applications while also adding instant visibility on how their background jobs are doing.
The open-source version passes a million downloads a month. The paid version, JobRunr Pro, runs inside banks, insurers, hospitals, retailers and government agencies across Europe and the US. We are a small team: two founders and a handful of people, with sales and marketing run by one of the founders.
Why This Role Exists
We have some information about which teams are running JobRunr in open source and which companies are reading their way through our website, so we can often put a name to a company before anyone there has spoken to us. That is a small slice of everyone using JobRunr, and turning even that slice into named people and real conversations takes time we do not have. One founder handles every buyer conversation, and there are only so many hours in his week.
That gap between “we know the company” and “we are talking to someone there” is the entire job.
The Role
You open the conversation. What happens after that is your call. If you would rather hand the account over completely once someone shows genuine interest, that is fine and we take it from there. If you want to stay in it, the founder steps in at that moment and the two of you work the account together.
The play is account-based and it starts from a signal rather than a list you bought. A company shows up as running JobRunr or spending real time on our site, and from there we work the whole account: the engineer who actually watches the dashboard, and the engineering director or CTO above them.
What You Will Do
- Run the account list. Target accounts drawn from the companies we can see using JobRunr or looking at our site. You rank them, keep the list current and decide who is worth the effort.
- Decide the approach yourself. The strategy, the wording and how you target people are yours to work out. We will tell you everything we know about an account, and then we want your judgement on it rather than ours.
- Write to people, not to lists. This is not an automation play. We would rather send fewer messages that are genuinely targeted and written by hand than thousands that are not. Use AI wherever it helps, and we do at every step, but this is one of the places where a human still makes the difference.
- Verify before you send. Bad addresses cost us sender reputation, and we would rather send fewer messages that land.
- Move fast on replies. Anything warm gets picked up the same day, whether you carry it on with the founder or hand it over.
- Keep the CRM honest. Every touch logged in HubSpot, every reply routed, one scoreboard row filled in every Friday.
- Clear the backlog. There is a review queue with dozens of researched leads that nobody has had time to send. Emptying it is week one.
What Success Looks Like
We would rather be specific than vague, so here is the bar we will judge this against.
- Three enterprise opportunities created inside the ninety days.
- Around ten trials generated in the same period.
- At day ninety we either extend the contract or stop, and you will know which way it is going long before that date arrives.
Who We Are Looking For
You have sold, or fed, European enterprise software before. You know what a deal in the tens of thousands looks like, how a buying committee behaves, and why procurement takes another six weeks after the technical yes.
- A network among software vendors and system integrators in Belgium, the Netherlands or the DACH region is what makes this role work faster than we could on our own.
- Excellent English. German or Dutch is a genuine advantage, since a large part of our customer base sits in German-speaking and Benelux markets.
- You can write to developers and CTOs without sounding like a sequence. Our audience recognises templated outreach instantly and is not shy about saying so in public. Personal, short and specific beats clever.
- You are already comfortable with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, an email sequencer (we use Lemlist) and a CRM (we use HubSpot).
- You do not need to write Java. You do need enough curiosity to understand what a background job is and why a bank cares when one fails at three in the morning. We will teach you the product.
It is a plus if you have sold developer tools, infrastructure software or anything with an open-source core, where the user and the buyer are rarely the same person.
What We Offer and Ask For
- A monthly retainer plus a bonus for every qualified enterprise opportunity you create. Tell us your rate for ten hours a week.
- Direct access to both founders, with no layers in between and no reporting theatre.
- A defined experiment with an end date, rather than a vague promise about what this could become. If it works, it grows.
- Research, target lists, vertical proof points and everything we know about an account, prepared for you. We are not sending you in cold.
- Remote, with a kickoff day at our office in Leuven.
Things We Value in Our Team
- Drive: Strive for excellence and go above and beyond to make a mark.
- Openness: Share ideas and feedback openly and respectfully with the team.
- Accountability: Deliver on your promises and take ownership of your projects.
- User-centricity: We prioritize the developers using our product and focus on their productivity.
- Flexibility: Our goals are ambitious, so we remain flexible and evolve based on our learnings.
Interview Process
- A conversation about deals you have actually opened, and how you opened them.
- A short exercise: we hand you three real companies from our own list, and you tell us who you would contact and what you would write to them. An hour of work, not a weekend.
- A final call with both founders.
To Apply
Email nicholas@jobrunr.io with your CV or LinkedIn profile, your rate for ten hours a week, and the date you could start. Tell us about the experience you have in this sector specifically, and why you would be the right person for this one.
JobRunr is an equal opportunity employer.