Vice President, Strategic Account Executive - NASA

Leidos has a career opening for a NASA Account Executive.

Everything Leidos does is built on our commitment to do the right thing for our customers, our employees, and our communities. Our 48,000 employees help define who we are and what we stand for as a business. Our team is committed to working collaboratively to serve the customer. With diverse and complementary skillsets, backgrounds, and experiences, our personnel work in fast paced, highly flexible, mission centric environments to get the job done and make a difference. We have strong values—integrity, innovation, agility, collaboration, and commitment—that are the Leidos way of life. Our culture and values work in tandem with the work we do every day in supporting the missions of our customers on the front lines of some of the most challenging markets.  

The NASA Account Manager (NAM) is the lead Leidos executive responsible for building, sustaining, and advancing trusted relationships with NASA agency level and ten Center level leadership. The candidate will serve as the senior Leidos executive responsible for NASA customer relationships and engagements and will be a key contributor to the company’s business growth strategy to expand and grow Leidos business supporting the NASA account that spans across three sectors of the company. The candidate will communicate and collaborate extensively with company technical matter experts, including CIO, CTO and business area leaders internal to Leidos and its wholly owned subsidiaries, to develop strategies to serve the operational and capability needs of the NASA customers.  Additionally, the NAM will work to identify customer technology requirements and facilitate discussions to inform technology and capability development efforts, including Leidos Internal and commercial R&D investments.

The NAM will seek to strengthen Leidos customer relations and enhance business growth across the company’s Digital Modernization, Defense Systems, and Health-Civil Sector portfolios related to NASA programs, services, and solutions.  The NAM must thoroughly understand key influencers and decision makers within NASA customers across the agency and partners with essential roles in NASA matters.  The candidate must demonstrate a working knowledge of the roles and responsibilities of each NASA Center and NASA HQ, including organizational design, acquisition and procurement, governance, and funding mechanisms.  Additionally, the candidate should possess significant career government and/or industry credentials including executive-level leadership experience, extensive operational experience and background, a comprehensive understanding of current and evolving missions, operational concepts, policy, doctrine, acquisition, and procurement, contracting and funding. The position regularly updates and reports to the Digital Modernization, Health-Civil, and Defense Systems Chief Growth Officers and Business area leaders.

Core Responsibilities:

General responsibilities include: developing the annual NASA Account Plan, identifying, qualifying, and supporting business opportunities and captures, creating future business sales opportunities and associated sales plays featuring Leidos disruptive technologies, facilitating on-contract growth and capture on NASA operations and programs where business opportunities exist; facilitating requirements development; marketing the full range of corporate capabilities; and maximizing internal collaboration as detailed in the specific responsibilities below.

Customer Relations and Understanding:

• Service as the primary interface to the NASA customer
• Ensure a coherent, integrated Leidos message to the customer while promoting corporate capabilities and solutions to meet customer needs.
• Build, improve and manage significant key individual customer relationships.
• Promote and introduce corporate capabilities, technologies, services, and solutions to the customer and be familiar with tech development efforts and with new and improved offerings.
• Possess an in-depth understanding of the customer’s missions and Leidos services, solutions, and products.
• Possess an in-depth understanding of the NASA account’s competitive landscape, including competitors and potential partners.
• Develop, track, and execute a strategic-level Customer Engagement Plan, including regular, periodic meetings with strategically relevant influencers, decision makers, and leaders.
• Host senior customer visits to Leidos and arrange visits to customer sites, as appropriate.
• Function as senior NASA executive representative responsible for customer engagement and government relations related to customer matters, issues, and concerns.
• Participate with Leidos capture teams on key strategic NASA captures including, providing customer updates and validate capture team’s customer and opportunity knowledge; participate in call plan development and coordination of customer visits; participate in collaboration sessions, and reviews throughout the capture process; ensure voice of the customer is reflected in proposals; support Executive Summary decision points, sessions and reviews. 
• Share all customer information with Line Leadership, BD Lead, Capture Manager at Key Decision Points Sessions & Reviews

Strategic Communications:

• Represent Leidos to NASA and NASA to Leidos.
• Define Leidos to the customer by communicating the full breadth and depth of Leidos’ services and solutions that can support their missions.
• Define the customer to Leidos Business Area and Growth stakeholders to ensure a comprehensive understanding of customer needs and trends.
• Track pertinent NASA account information horizontally across all Leidos Groups and communicate it to leaders to aid in business development, capture, and program execution.
• Provide senior customers an avenue to communicate satisfaction or dissatisfaction with Leidos program and contract performance.
• Communicate internally across Leidos groups by hosting monthly NASA Account meetings to facilitate planning and execution, coordinating engagement and events, tracking NASA account financial performance, disseminating customer information, and tracking emerging opportunities, issues, and results.
• Build a sense of community among Leidos NASA stakeholders.
• Exercise active thought leadership through speaking, writing, and personal communications to promote Leidos brand awareness and technology leadership.

Strategic Planning:

• Develop and maintain Account Plans and execute Sales Plays to drive growth
• Develop the annual NASA Account Plan to include the following:
  • Inform the annual strategic planning process by providing insights into NASA requirements, challenges, and opportunities.
  • Assess all NASA customer directions, trends, and strategic opportunities on a 3–5-year time horizon, providing results to strategic captures and campaigns to internal business and technology leaders.
  • Help develop new ideas and solutions to capture new business. Contribute to strategic planning by providing insights into changes in NASA missions, acquisition, procurement, contracting approaches and funding profiles.
  • Demonstrate critical thinking, assessment and analysis of NASA plans and strategy documents reflecting mission and business priorities and requirements.
  • Contribute to the company’s Competitive Intelligence efforts by providing insights, assessments and recommendations on customer, partner and competitor activities, intentions, and trends.
• Coordinate and attend meetings, as requested, with line management at the Sector, Business Area, and Divisional levels to identify and shape strategic approaches to the customer.

Portfolio Management:

• Support and coordinate among Leidos organizations seeking to develop business with NASA.
• Support identification of the right Leidos capabilities and resources for identified opportunities.
• Actively contribute to the development of new ideas and solutions to capture new business to increase Leidos’ market share across the NASA account. 
• Help grow the pipeline of qualified target opportunities by providing NASA Account pipeline recommendations to Growth and business area leadership across the Leidos Sectors
• Align NASA Account pipeline to Sector pipelines
• Support Line leadership to ensure pipeline aligns with the strategic plan and growth goals
• Identify proper Sector lead for NASA opportunities that cut across more than one Leidos Sector
• Coordinate with line management to identify and resolve/mitigate OCI issues as they emerge, and work with strategic, line and business development leaders to avoid these concerns as necessary.

General NASA Account: 

• Manage all account-specific resources within the budgets established in the Account Plan, including trade shows, sponsorships, and travel.
• Manage tier1 trade shows and customer sponsorships and memberships
• Coordinate across Sector and Operation lines to prepare for trade show events and maximize Leidos exposure, messaging, communications, and value.
• Conduct customer assessments on contract performance and provide feedback to appropriate business line organizations.
• Coordinate with account line management to resolve any conflicting internal or customer-based issues.
• Assist customer with acquisition strategy
• Facilitate on-contract growth

Required Experience, Education, and Skills:

• Bachelor’s degree required, and 15+ years of experience with extensive senior-levels of leadership, professional knowledge and job experience working for key government agencies or in an executive position. Master’s degree or equivalent preferred.
• Service as former NASA Senior Executive Service.
• Must possess extensive understanding of NASA organization, doctrine, concepts, and requirements.
• Demonstrated ability to develop new and innovative ideas and solutions to address emerging missions and capabilities, leading to year over year business growth.
• Ability to track changing needs and match Leidos' wide range of capabilities to these needs.
• Proven ability to work in a complex, multi-faceted organization with a wide range of customer offerings.
• Ability to develop and sustain government relationships at all levels.
• Recognized thought and innovation leadership with excellent oral and written communication skills.

Desired personal attributes include self-initiative, self-reliance, teamwork, strong social skills, exceptional problem-solving abilities, well-developed personal and professional network.

Original Posting:May 1, 2025

For U.S. Positions: While subject to change based on business needs, Leidos reasonably anticipates that this job requisition will remain open for at least 3 days with an anticipated close date of no earlier than 3 days after the original posting date as listed above.

Pay Range:Pay Range $216,800.00 - $348,750.00

The Leidos pay range for this job level is a general guideline only and not a guarantee of compensation or salary. Additional factors considered in extending an offer include (but are not limited to) responsibilities of the job, education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity, alignment with market data, applicable bargaining agreement (if any), or other law.