Mission Lead - Tampa (Clearance Required)

Vannevar•Tampa, FL

5h•Onsite

About The Position

Vannevar is a defense technology company building AI to deter adversaries. This role involves embedding directly with Department of War (DOW) customers across the United States, specifically based in Tampa, FL. The Mission Lead will work as part of a mission-focused team to deploy software against challenging problems. This is a customer-facing role requiring frequent travel, sitting alongside uniformed service members and civilian operators. The primary objective is to earn trust by creating value: understanding user goals, decomposing problems into mission hypotheses, testing these hypotheses through product workflows, and onboarding users. This role is distinct from traditional customer success or product roles, focusing on solving complex and ambiguous problems by configuring product workflows, testing releases, triaging issues, and collaborating with product and engineering teams. The role requires operating independently on-site, setting priorities, and maximizing mission impact. It involves cultivating relationships with new user groups, generating wins, and translating these into stories for company expansion. The position requires an active Top Secret clearance and involves working in secure or classified environments with periodic travel.

Requirements

Active TS clearance.
Based in Tampa, FL.
Comfort in the field; ability to build trust with users in operational environments.
High ownership; taking responsibility for outcomes and operating independently.
Grit and persistence; ability to work through ambiguity, iteration, and friction.
Strong mission judgment; ability to identify which user problems matter and where product can create value.
Technical intuition; ability to reason about how software systems work, break, and how to improve them.
Curiosity about agentic AI; excitement to understand, configure, and apply AI-enabled systems.
Professional presence; ability to show up in high-stakes government environments as a trusted technical partner.

Responsibilities

Embed with users and sit on-site with DOW customer groups to build deep intuition for their mission.
Build trust and earn credibility by understanding user problems and helping solve them.
Turn ambiguity into hypotheses by breaking complex mission problems into specific, testable workflows.
Configure product workflows for users through creative, iterative configuration.
Test and troubleshoot product issues on deployed DOW systems and work with engineering to resolve them.
Identify what works, onboard users, and translate wins into evidence of impact.
Build relationships with additional teams on-site and identify where Vannevar can create value.
Operate independently on-site, setting priorities and pushing work through without waiting for perfect direction.
Represent Vannevar as the face of the company with DOW users and customers.