EMPLOYER IS A CONTRACTOR FOR THE U.S. GOVERNMENT. THIS POSITION WILL REQUIRE U.S. CITIZENSHIP AND ACTIVE SECRET CLEARANCE.
Role Description:
This role works within Defense Unicorns' Army Domain and serves as a mission-focused technical leader responsible for driving customer success, delivery execution, and adoption of Defense Unicorns solutions across Army mission portfolios.
The Senior Mission Manager works closely with Army customers, engineering teams, and senior mission leaders to ensure successful delivery of secure software and platform capabilities. This individual owns the translation of mission requirements into actionable work, drives execution across cross-functional teams, and serves as a trusted technical advisor to customers throughout the delivery lifecycle.
This role is ideal for individuals with significant operational military experience, technical solution delivery experience, or customer-facing engineering backgrounds who can own mission outcomes independently and help shape the direction of Army delivery efforts.
Key Responsibilities:
- Develop and maintain deep expertise in Defense Unicorns products and capabilities, including UDS, Fleet, Zarf, and supporting platform technologies
- Translate customer requirements, mission needs, and operational challenges into actionable work items and delivery plans
- Own mission outcomes and delivery execution with minimal oversight
- Manage backlog management, sprint planning, prioritization, and delivery tracking activities
- Work directly with Army stakeholders to understand mission objectives, gather requirements, and communicate progress
- Effectively communicate technical concepts and solution capabilities to both technical and non-technical audiences
- Drive identification of customer challenges, future capability needs, and opportunities for expanded support
- Monitor delivery risks, dependencies, and issues while coordinating mitigation plans
- Partner with technical leads, architects, and engineers to ensure solutions align with customer needs and engineering best practices
- Contribute technical input to proposals, technical responses, white papers, and ROM development efforts
- Support onboarding and mentoring of team members
- Participate in hiring activities, candidate interviews, and team-building efforts
- Serve as a trusted technical advisor to customers throughout the delivery lifecycle
Required Qualifications:
- Hands-on experience with Kubernetes in production environments (Azure AKS, AWS EKS, or on-prem distributions such as RKE2, K3s, or OpenShift)
- Experience with Helm for packaging and deploying containerized applications
- Working knowledge of GitOps workflows and Infrastructure-as-Code tools (Terraform, OpenTofu)
- Familiarity with hybrid cloud architectures, including networking, RBAC, and storage for cloud and on-prem clusters
- Understanding of DevSecOps/DevOps principles and CI/CD pipelines (GitLab or GitHub)
- Experience working with or supporting the U.S. Army, Army Software Factory, or similar DoD software organizations
- Strong communication skills and effectiveness in a fully remote team environment
- Self-motivated and able to work independently with minimal supervision
- Willingness to travel as needed for on-site training and support
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience with system image creation, architecture design, and deployment pipelines
- Experience with Zarf, UDS, or similar air-gapped deployment tooling
- Comfortable serving as a primary customer-facing technical resource, including production support and platform guidance
- DoD IAT Level II certification (such as Security+)
The listed responsibilities are not exhaustive and additional responsibilities may be assigned based on the evolving needs of the organization. We are seeking a dynamic individual who is able to adapt and take on new responsibilities as they arise.
Full compensation packages are based on candidate experience. Compensation ranges are established using national benchmarking data and apply across all geographic locations within the United States.
$142,375 - $192,625 USD
Defense Unicorns delivers mission value by streamlining software delivery so our customers can focus on the most important challenges. We share a vision of freedom and security for the advancement of progress and innovation. Our commitment to this vision, and to our mission-driven customers, means a commitment to speed, user experience and optionality, without compromising security. Our team is composed of innovators, software engineers, and veterans with decades of experience delivering technology programs across the federal market.
What We DoWe create and deliver secure solutions for continuous software integration and delivery. Defense Unicorns consolidates the best practices for security pipelines, testing, and deployment automation in order to meet the high security requirements valued by mission owners. Our solutions are agnostic by design and we believe that growing a robust ecosystem of secure, cloud-native software solutions can help enterprise customers inside and outside the federal market buy and integrate software more easily.
Who We ServeDefense Unicorns’ customers are mission-focused leaders across public and private enterprises. We proudly support defense and civil agencies across the U.S. government and we work closely with the creators of leading-edge software solutions to deliver value to the mission-owner by improving the security and consumability of commercial software products.
What We Work On- Kubernetes
- Cloud Environments (AWS/GCP and Azure)
- Infrastructure-as-code (like Terraform/Pulumi)
- Continuous Delivery and automation tooling
- GitOps
- Containers
- CNCF projects and open source products and packages
- Helm/Kustomize-Value Stream Mapping
- Building and improving security delivery
- Building Kubernetes and cloud native applications
- Medical/Dental/Vision
- Premiums are 100% Company Paid
- Health Savings Account
- Life Insurance
- Disability Insurance
- 401k Retirement Plan
- Company Stock Options
- Home Office Budget
- We offer all full-time Unicorns Flexible Time Off (FTO) plus all Federal Holidays, one week for Thanksgiving, and two weeks for Christmas and New Year’s
- Paid Parental Leave
- Reimbursement for approved trainings/subscriptions
- Conferences (travel, lodging, and fees)
Don’t have all the preferred experience or qualifications? Studies show that underrepresented groups like women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs if they don't meet every requirement listed.
At Defense Unicorns, we're committed to diversity. If you're enthusiastic about the role but don't match every criteria, we encourage you to apply. You could be the perfect fit for this or another role! Defense Unicorns is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, national origin, veteran status, genetic information, union status and/or beliefs, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law.
CCPA DISCLOSURE
Skills Required
- U.S. citizenship
- Active Secret security clearance
- Hands-on production experience with Kubernetes (Azure AKS, AWS EKS, or on-prem distributions such as RKE2, K3s, or OpenShift)
- Experience with Helm for packaging and deploying containerized applications
- Working knowledge of GitOps workflows
- Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code tools (Terraform, OpenTofu)
- Familiarity with hybrid cloud architectures including networking, RBAC, and storage for cloud and on-prem clusters
- Understanding of DevSecOps/DevOps principles and CI/CD pipelines (GitLab or GitHub)
- Experience working with or supporting the U.S. Army, Army Software Factory, or similar DoD software organizations
- Strong written and verbal communication skills and effectiveness in a fully remote team environment
- Self-motivated and able to work independently with minimal supervision
- Willingness to travel as needed for on-site training and support
- Ability to own mission outcomes, manage backlogs, sprint planning, prioritization, and delivery tracking
What We Do
Defense Unicorns specializes in platform technologies that enable rapid and reliable delivery of capabilities across a wide range of mission and technology areas. We support open architecture platforms for secure mission systems that provide optionality for the end user, promote scalability, and allow for continuous identification and integration of new products and services while avoiding vendor lock. Our open approach creates partnership opportunities across the software ecosystem. Our people are innovators, software engineers, and veterans with decades of experience delivering technology programs across DoD and the broader federal market. Let's drive change together. Get in touch at [email protected]
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