Senior Mission Manager

Defense Unicorns

1d•$142,375 - $192,625•Remote

About The Position

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.

Requirements

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
U.S. Citizenship and active SECRET clearance

Nice To Haves

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+)

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