went through GitHub's enterprise account executive interview in Q1 2026 for a mid-market AE role. background: 8 years enterprise SaaS sales, mostly developer tools adjacent, had sold into engineering orgs before.
the process is more structured than most SaaS AE loops i've done.
recruiter screen (30 min): standard stuff but they probed on enterprise deal complexity early. 'what's the largest deal you've closed, walk me through the buying committee.' also asked about my familiarity with developer workflows, which matters more here than at a generic SaaS company.
hiring manager round (60 min): this felt like the real screen. sales leadership at GitHub is sharp. they walked me through a scenario: 'you have a warm inbound from a 500-person engineering team, they're using GitHub Enterprise Cloud already at low penetration, how do you expand.' they wanted to see multi-threader thinking: how do i get to champion, how do i get to exec sponsor, how do i map the buying process across security, legal, finance, and eng leadership.
mock pitch / role play (45 min): they played the CTO of a mid-size tech company. i had to run a discovery + pitch around GitHub Advanced Security (GHAS). this is where a lot of people stumble if they haven't done their homework on the actual product. you need to know what GHAS does, why a CTO cares about it vs a VP Eng vs a CISO. they're selling to technical buyers and your pitch has to reflect that.
panel round (3 x 30 min): one with a peer AE, one with an SE, one with marketing ops. the peer AE conversation was genuinely interesting: war stories, deal cycles, how they think about territory. the SE conversation was technical: 'how do you bring in the SE, at what stage, how do you prep them.'
what matters: you must actually understand the GitHub product suite and how enterprise adoption works in developer tools. the buying process for GitHub Enterprise is different from selling CRM or HR software. the champion is usually an eng leader. the blocker is usually procurement or security. the deal size depends on seat count and which SKUs get added. know your product.