Account Executive, SMB, German-speaking

Account Executive, SMB, German-speaking

Remote - Ireland, United Kingdom

Join Shopify's DACH SMB team as an Account Executive focused on acquiring new D2C merchants. You'll work directly with founders, business owners, and fast-growing brands across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, generally within the $1 million to $5 million GMV segment, helping them launch, scale, or transform their commerce operations with Shopify.

This is a full-cycle, high-velocity acquisition role. You'll create your own pipeline, run sharp discovery and qualification, build relevant business cases, and own the sales process from first outreach through negotiation and signature.

Success here requires outbound excellence, high agency, strong product fluency, and disciplined execution. You'll identify the right merchants, understand their growth priorities, and connect their needs to Shopify's commerce platform, checkout, payments, and international capabilities.

Key Responsibilities

• Identify and win net-new D2C merchants across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

• Generate pipeline through high-volume, high-quality outbound across calls, email, social, events, partners, and your own network.

• Engage founders, business owners, and commerce leaders to understand their goals, challenges, and growth plans.

• Run structured discovery and qualification to establish merchant fit, business need, decision process, and timing.

• Identify commerce transformation triggers: checkout performance, international expansion, platform limitations, operational complexity, and total cost of ownership.

• Position the right Shopify capabilities across the core platform, Shopify Plus, Checkout, Shopify Payments, Shop Pay, Markets, and the partner ecosystem.

• Own the complete sales cycle from prospecting through commercial negotiation and signature, with clear next steps and strong momentum.

• Build and maintain a healthy pipeline, prioritize the highest-potential opportunities, and forecast accurately.

• Collaborate with Sales Development, Solutions Engineering, Partnerships, and Marketing to improve merchant outcomes.

• Build productive relationships with agencies and technology partners across the DACH commerce ecosystem.

• Operate with discipline in CRM and sales tools: pipeline hygiene, opportunity documentation, current next steps.

• Leverage (and build your own) AI agents to improve research, outreach quality, merchant preparation, and deal execution.

• Test new approaches, document what works, and contribute to Shopify's DACH SMB acquisition playbook.

• Travel within DACH for merchant meetings, partner engagements, and industry events.

Qualifications

• Native or fluent German and professional English are required. You are comfortable selling to German founders and business owners in German.

• Proven success in a full-cycle closing role in B2B SaaS, commerce, or another competitive technology environment.

• Strong outbound prospecting skills: you build your own pipeline instead of waiting for inbound.

• Comfortable in a high-volume, high-velocity sales environment while maintaining strong discovery, qualification, and follow-through.

• A consistent track record of achieving or exceeding new business targets.

• Consultative selling skills: you uncover merchant needs, quantify business impact, and recommend the right solution.

• Confident commercial negotiation with a focus on win-win outcomes.

• Strong pipeline management, forecasting, and organizational discipline.

• Comfort learning technical product depth and working with Solution Engineers when deeper validation is required.

• High agency, resilience, and a builder mindset: you take ownership, improve playbooks, and stay effective as priorities change.

Bonus

• Familiarity with the DACH ecommerce ecosystem, commerce platforms, agencies, or technology partners.

• Experience selling ecommerce, payments, retail technology, or SaaS solutions.

• Experience sourcing, influencing, or co-selling opportunities with partners.

What we’re looking for in salespeople

• Builder mindset: You don’t just follow a playbook—you improve it. You test, iterate, document, and scale what works.
• Closing discipline: You’ve owned outcomes and can run a process forward with urgency and rigor (closing experience required for AE roles).
• Outbound excellence: You proactively create a pipeline through high-intent outreach across channels (calls, email, social, events, partners).
• Technical sales craft: You run structured discovery, quantify impact, build mutual plans, and maintain strong CRM hygiene/forecasting.
• Execution intensity: You bring pace, resilience, competitiveness, and the ability to take a hit and keep going.
• High agency: You default to action, take ownership, and don’t wait to be told.
• Thrive in ambiguity + change: You stay effective when priorities shift, products evolve, and you’re building while selling.
• Partner ecosystem experience: You’ve sourced, influenced, or co-sold deals with partners (agencies, SIs, ISVs, referral partners).
• System-to-system / integration exposure: You can confidently sell into technical requirements (APIs, ERPs, POS, middleware) alongside Solution Engineers.

How we work

Shopify rewards builders with high agency. You’ll have real autonomy, high standards, and a fast pace. We iterate, we challenge each other, and we expect you to take ownership of outcomes—not wait for perfect conditions. If you want comfort and certainty, this won’t fit. If you want responsibility and growth, it will.

Shopifyhttps://www.shopify.com

About the discipline

Sales at Shopify

Every discipline at Shopify works close to real merchant problems. You'll join a team that owns meaningful scope, ships to a high bar, and helps millions of entrepreneurs start, run, and scale their businesses.

Growth and rewards

Mastery-matched compensation.

Explore rewards

~Mastery

At Shopify, getting better at your craft and increasing your impact is how you grow. Twice a year, we assess both in our ~Mastery cycle, Shopify’s performance review. Achieving higher ~Mastery is a promotion, and when you earn a promotion your total rewards grow with it. Crafter and manager are equal paths, so you can pursue excellence in the craft you’re best at.

Total Rewards

With Flex Comp, your Rewards Wallet gives you agency over your compensation mix. Adjust your mix of cash, restricted share units, and stock options (including programs like Long-Term Equity)* to where it makes sense for you, and mix it up anytime as life and priorities change. Buying a house? Want more skin in the game? Just experimenting? It’s your call.

* Flex Comp program offerings vary based on location, role, and employment type. Full details are set out in our Terms & Conditions and related plan documents.

Built for real life

Room for the rest of your life.

Flexible work, remote by design

A flexible vacation policy means most Shopifolk can take the vacation days they feel they need to recharge.

If a change of everyday scenery is more your jam, Destination 90 means you can work from (almost) anywhere in the world for 90 days of the year.

Your setup

Your battlestation is your home base. Request the desk, chair, and AV gear you need to get shit done.

Benefits

You need ‘em, we’ve got ‘em. Our health and welfare benefits may include health, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance depending on your country. If you’re in a country without a package, you'll receive a monthly allowance. We also offer mental health support for you and your dependents, including immediate and confidential services like counseling and coaching sessions.

Family support

We offer fertility benefits globally, along with paid parental leave to welcome a new family member.

Applying to work here

Show us your craft.

Read the candidate guide

1Life Story

The Life Story is how we understand the themes of your career journey so far, human to human. What you’ve learned, and how you made a difference. Show us the trophies and the bruises: the problems you’ve solved, the challenges you encountered, the decisions you made, and the lessons you learned along the way.

2Craft assessment

We’re looking for world-class crafters. Crafters obsessed with pursuing excellence in their field. Our craft assessment looks at your personal journey toward mastery, and your potential to go broader and deeper in novel ways.

You’ll start with an online assessment, followed by a craft assessment. Show us what you do best, and how you do it. Shopify’s bar is high. Let your skills do the talking.

3Craft interviews

Building on your craft assessment, these interviews dive deeper into your experience and technical aptitude. Depending on the role, this may include technical deep dives focusing on projects you've previously worked on, collaborating in a design critique, exploring a dataset using SQL, or taking the lead on solving a problem with your interviewer as your co-pilot.