Defense Sales Lead

Parallel Works

11d•Remote

About The Position

Parallel Works is hiring a Defense Sales Lead to create pipeline and run capture across the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community. Our defense business includes a platform authorized at Impact Level 5, prototype other transaction work, task orders with military service laboratories, and delivery as a subcontractor under large integrators. This is a full cycle role: identify the program, build the program office relationship before a solicitation exists, assemble the team, drive the proposal with our technical staff, and stay on the account after award. Parallel Works has no separate capture organization, and you will often be the only sales person in the room on a technical pursuit. You would work with the Chief Executive Officer, the Director of Sales, and the Director of Operations on contracts and compliance.

Requirements

10 or more years selling technology or technical services into the Department of Defense or the Intelligence Community, with awards you personally sourced and closed.
Working fluency in Federal acquisition: full and open competition, prototype other transactions, broad agency announcements, sole source justification, and what each demands of a small business.
Pre-solicitation capture work, not only proposal response.
Relationships inside at least one relevant buying community, for example a service research laboratory, a defense innovation or rapid acquisition organization, a combatant command, or a Defense agency computing program.
Enough technical literacy in cloud, HPC, or AI infrastructure to run a first meeting without an engineer present.
CRM discipline and forecasts that held up.
United States citizenship and eligibility for a Secret clearance, since the work reaches export controlled Government environments. An active clearance helps. We sponsor candidates who are eligible but not currently cleared.

Nice To Haves

Selling accredited software platforms, FedRAMP or Impact Level, where the authorization is part of the value.
Small business or startup experience, where the seller also does qualification, pricing input, and follow through.
Working knowledge of contract types: firm fixed price, cost plus, time and materials.
Standing up or improving a capture process instead of inheriting one.

Responsibilities

Pipeline creation: build and hold a qualified defense pipeline from program office relationships, industry days, partner introductions, and our own opportunity scoring.
Pre-solicitation engagement: meet program offices before the request for proposal exists, respond to sources sought notices and requests for information, and get us positioned inside the requirement.
Capture and proposals: run capture plans, teaming decisions, and review gates, and work with the technical team and the Director of Operations to produce compliant volumes on schedule.
Position the hybrid capability: explain how ACTIVATE federates a program's own on-premises HPC and GPU systems with accredited Government cloud and commercial GPU capacity under one login and one accounting model. Programs that own hardware and intend to keep it are the closest fit.
Vehicles and teaming: choose the acquisition path for each pursuit, and develop teaming with the integrators and mission primes that hold the programs we want to be on.
Forecasting: keep the pipeline tracker honest on win probability, timing, and why a pursuit slipped.