Sales Lead, Business to Government

Cognire · Tamil nadu, India

We are looking for one smart, driven, curious person who speaks Tamil and English, is excited about AI, and wants to put it to work inside government.

We care more about how you think than how long your CV is.

WHY THIS ROLE EXISTS

Tamil Nadu created India's first dedicated state AI ministry in May 2026. It is funded at ₹398 crore for 2026–27, it reaches across 54 departments, and most of what it has announced does not yet have anyone building it.

Roughly 80 million people speak Tamil. Almost none of them can use a government service by speaking their own language to a machine, because nobody has built it yet. That is the gap.

Every technology shift so far reached business first and government years later. This one does not have to. Tamil Nadu has the budget, the mandate and the political will right now. Someone is going to be in the room when those decisions get made. We want that person to be you.

WHAT YOU WILL ACTUALLY DO

Get into rooms. Build relationships across the AI, IT and Digital Services Department, TNeGA, ELCOT, iTNT Hub and the line departments that own the real problems.

Listen properly. Sit with officials, understand what actually breaks in their day, and bring back problems worth solving rather than requirements documents.

Tell the story. Explain in Tamil, to people who are not engineers, why an AI agent that answers a citizen in their own language and then closes the ticket is different from a chatbot. You will be doing this in front of ministers, secretaries and district officers.

Learn the machinery. Tenders, empanelment, DPRs, EMDs, the Deep Tech Startup Policy route that lets the state buy pilots without an open tender. You do not need to know this on day one. You do need to be the sort of person who has it figured out by month three.

Get the first pilot signed. One department, one pilot, ninety days. That first reference is what every deal after it is built on.

Come back with a point of view. What we should build next, where we are losing, what the state will need in two years that nobody is talking about yet.

WHO WE THINK YOU ARE

You speak Tamil and English fluently. Your meetings will be in Tamil and your documents in English.

You follow AI closely because you find it interesting, not because it is on a job description. You have opinions about where it is going. You have probably built or tried something yourself.

You think in terms of what could exist, not just what is being asked for. When you see a government process, you can see the version of it that works ten times better.

You are comfortable being new. You will walk into rooms where you are the youngest person and the least credentialed, and you will need to be worth listening to anyway.

You write clearly and follow up without being chased.

You want ownership more than you want a safe title.

WHAT WE ARE NOT ASKING FOR

Twenty years in government sales. A Rolodex you inherited. An MBA. Experience selling AI specifically.

If you have public sector experience, that helps and we will use it. If you do not, and everything above still sounds like you, apply anyway and tell us why.

HOW THE ENGAGEMENT WORKS

This starts as a contract and converts to a permanent role. We are being straight about that rather than dressing it up. You get to see whether this market and this team are what you want, and we get to see you work before either side commits.

The path to conversion is not a mystery. Land the first pilot and the role is yours.

WHAT YOU GET

The first market, the first deals and the first reference customers are yours. You report to our GTM leader and work directly with our technology leader, our sales operations leader and two advisors, so you are never more than one conversation from a decision.

You will learn government procurement, enterprise selling and applied AI at the same time, on live deals, in a state that is moving faster than the rest of the country.

WHY COGNIRE

We build AI agents that complete work rather than answer questions. Our technology already runs voice agents, multi-agent orchestration and conversational memory for private sector clients. We are now pointing it at Tamil language citizen services, which nobody has done properly yet.

HOW TO APPLY

Send your CV and a short note on one government service you have personally found frustrating and how you would rebuild it with AI.