Principal General Manager

About Tribe AI

Tribe AI is an AI-native services company on a mission to help enterprises realize the value of AI for their business. Today, every large enterprise wants to use AI to transform how it operates, but many lack the capabilities to do so. Tribe exists to close that gap—partnering with organizations to build best-in-class AI products by deploying the best talent in the business.

Role Overview

Principal General Managers are Tribe's most senior client-facing leaders. They carry all the accountability of a GM—end-to-end ownership of complex enterprise relationships, commercial outcomes, and delivery quality—and extend that into a second mandate: building the GM function itself.

The Principal GM is simultaneously a practitioner and a force multiplier. They maintain a portfolio of Tribe's most strategically significant accounts while coaching and developing the GMs around them, shaping how the role is hired for, and contributing to the internal systems and standards that define how Tribe runs its best engagements.

Hadley Riegel, Tom Lee and Zac Ludington currently hold this role. They are the model for what it looks like: deeply embedded with clients, credible with C-suite executives, and actively invested in making the GMs they work alongside better.

This is not a management role that moves people away from the work. Principal GMs stay close to accounts. The additional scope is additive—more complexity, more leverage, more ownership over outcomes that extend beyond their own portfolio.

Core Responsibilities

Enterprise Account Ownership

Own Tribe's most complex, highest-value client relationships end to end. Originate and shape new engagements, manage commercial terms and portfolio health, partner with delivery and product leads to ensure execution quality, and drive expansion across multi-year program-level partnerships. Everything in the GM role, at greater scale and ambiguity.

GM Coaching & Development

Partner closely with GMs on their accounts, deals, and client strategy. Provide structured and informal coaching—helping GMs navigate difficult client situations, sharpen their engagement-shaping instincts, and develop into increasingly autonomous operators. You are not their manager, but you are accountable for their growth.

Team & Practice Building

Contribute to the internal infrastructure of the GM function: playbooks, onboarding, deal frameworks, account review processes, and standards for how Tribe runs its most important engagements. This work is not overhead—it is how the team scales without diluting quality.

Strategic Firm Contribution

Engage with Tribe's founders and leadership on cross-functional priorities—partnership strategy, market positioning, capability development. Principal GMs have a seat at the table on decisions that shape the direction of the business.

Candidate Profile

The Principal GM is someone who has already done the GM job well—and is ready to own more.

The right candidate has a track record of driving large, complex enterprise relationships to strong commercial outcomes, and has demonstrated the instinct to build beyond their own book of business. They have coached others, shaped how a team or practice operates, and taken ownership of outcomes they didn't directly control. They are the person others look to when a situation is ambiguous, a deal is hard, or a client relationship needs rescuing.

Required Experience

• 8–15+ years of progressive experience in enterprise consulting, services, account management, or complex solution environments—with direct accountability for client relationships and commercial outcomes at significant scale
• Demonstrated ability to manage a portfolio of high-value accounts while simultaneously developing and coaching others
• Track record of building something beyond your own work: a team, a practice, a hiring process, a set of standards that outlasted your direct involvement
• C-suite credibility across complex, multi-stakeholder organizations—the ability to challenge executives constructively, earn trust through substance, and influence without authority
• Experience recruiting, interviewing, and calibrating talent—ideally for roles similar to this one
• Deep familiarity with the AI landscape and genuine curiosity about how it is reshaping enterprise operations. Technical depth is not required, but you must be credible advising senior executives on AI strategy

What We Look For Beyond the Resume

The attributes that define our strongest GMs apply here, compounded:

• Intellectual depth and curiosity. You go layers deep. You can hold your own with a CIO and earn the respect of a technical delivery lead in the same week—and you can help a GM learn to do the same.
• Builder's mentality. You have built things that mattered: teams, portfolios, processes, practices. You take ownership of outcomes, not inputs, and you create structure where none existed.
• Judgment under ambiguity. You have operated in fast-moving environments where the playbook was still being written. You make decisions with incomplete information and own the results.
• Investment in others. You get genuine satisfaction from making the people around you better. You share what you know, you give direct feedback, and you hold a high bar without making people feel small.
• Intentionality and agency. You are running toward this space with conviction. You are building with AI, forming views about where it's going, and eager to be at the center of how enterprises adopt it.